Daedalus UAV

So I'm a Robotics student studying at UWE, and I've always wanted to build myself a Quadcopter. The idea of flying one has just been something I've wanted to do for years. Only problem is, I've never had the skills, experience or time to put it together. Luckily for me, I'm on my placement year which has given me the perfect amount of time to get something built and flying (and most likely crashing a few times too) before I start my 3rd year of studies.

I must interupt myself at this point to let you all know that I'm going to be summarizing about 6 months of development in one post (I kept forgetting to do one of these so this should be fun ^_^)

The Mk1 Drone Prototype - Featuring thrust vectoring

With this in mind - I set out to plan, design, construct and fly a Quadcopter by September 2013 so that it would be finished and optimized by the time I start next year. So off I went with the project and I threw together a few concept designs in Sketchup to get started. Initially, I wanted to put a Hexcopter together - but after reading a lot of posts on the wonderful DIY Drones forums I was advised to go for a Quadcopter for a first project, purely for simplicity and because it would be generally easier to get going. By this point I had already constructed a prototype, but seeing as MDF is a terrible material to build with it is a good thing I moved onto the more realistic Quadcopter approach.

With this in mind I made a few more designs, I managed to piece something together which looked fairly promising. After a few goes on the laser cutter I managed to put it together, but I wasn't satisfied with it. The bodywork felt way to heavy to fly properly - so I scrapped the design and went for a completely new one, based around the Talon V2 body from Hobbyking. After it arrived, I managed to lasercut some body plating to go onto it to attach speed controllers to as well as all the electronics. So, with that I managed to put together the next version of the drone: The Mk5 Prototype.

So after cobbling it together - we took it out for a test flight (The test pilot was my housemate as he had more experience with RC helicopters than myself sadly) This flight....didn't last very long. It did a backflip because I derped up and powered up the Drone before turning the remote control on. Lesson learnt the hard way >.< but no real damage done. A quick repair job later and the copter was ready to fly. After attaching a MultiWii-programmed board to it we took it out for a spin. Results were interesting - it seemed to be in Horizon mode (basically it was flying without stabilization control and was harder to fly) and we couldn't work out how to change it in the GUI while programming it.

The new copter was built, programmed and good to go with everything cable-tied down and nothing hanging off (except the FPV camera which was removed just before takeoff). So we took it outside and fired it up. We managed to get a good 30/40 seconds of flight out of it this time, with no crashes or problems. We didn't even lose a single propeller. >Here< is a video of its first successful flight:

So it works! And with its successful test flight, I christened it "Daedalus", as it seems to be an appropriate name for the Drone. But there's still a hell of a lot more work to do on it. Next step is to get the PID callibrated correctly, as well as install and improve the FPV system for flying it in a little more exciting fashion and of course GPS tracking for some advanced work. The body will be receiving minor improvements as work progresses in response to any problems encountered along its development. So check out the next post for updates on the next flight and development.