Abstract

An unmanned air vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is either controlled autonomously by computers in the vehicle, or under the remote control of a navigator, or pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. There are a wide variety of drone shapes, sizes, configurations, and characteristics. In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles has become a major research focus, since they can extend our capability in a variety of areas. A significant challenge in developing UAV is to extract and fuse the useful information in a robust manner and to provide stable flight. Historically, UAVs were simple remotely piloted aircraft, but autonomous control is increasingly being employed. This thesis is about design and control of quad-rotor with a focus on Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) systems. It describes a design methodology for a miniature rotorcraft. The methodology is subsequently applied to design an autonomous quad rotor. Two platforms were developed during this thesis. The first one is a quad-rotor like test-bench with off-board data processing and power supply. It was used to safely and easily test control strategies. The second one, is a highly integrated quad-rotor with on-board data processing and power supply. It has all the necessary sensors such as barometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and accelerometer for stable autonomous operation. The model deals with the autonomous take off and landing of a quad-rotor using microcontroller. The control signal(throttle) is fed into the flight controller which has on board sensors. The predefined data which control the quad rotor's altitude are fed from the microcontroller autonomously.