A NOVEL FLIGHT CONTROLLER DESIGN FOR MODULAR APPLICATIONS

Abstract

A local flight controller was developed for modular applications based on the Pixhawk 1 flight controller with modifications to accommodate companion computer provision for future integration. This design is made for future modular applications, but for now, the functionality and performance of the local flight controller were tested and compared to the Pixhawk flight controller. A simple 3D printed enclosure was made to house the local flight controller for easier mounting on UAV frames. To compare the performance of the developed controller, two setups were made: local flight controller and Pixhawk 1 on separate quadcopter frames, and local flight controller and Pixhawk Cube on separate fixed-wing frames. The flight controllers made use of the Ardupilot firmware, specifically ArduCopter and ArduPlane in conducting the flight tests. Auto flight mode was used to have autonomous flights which were then used to compare the flight data between test setups. The desired position and actual position were compared for each flight controller, and their differences with the other flight controllers were compared to see the variation between the different controllers used. After analyzing the data, the local flight controller developed was proven able to produce comparable results with the Pixhawk flight controllers. The percent difference between the mean values of the Pixhawk 1 and the local flight controller were 3.7064% and 8.6128% using the quadcopter frame for Position X and Y, respectively, while for the Pixhawk Cube and the local flight controller, the values were 12.6866% and 1.1045% using the fixed-wing frame, respectively.