MOTION CONTROL

Figure 1: Arm design

Figure 1 labels the key components of the motion control subsystem.

This subsystem encapsulates the mechanical, electrical and software aspects of the full system. Under SYSTEM LEVEL VIEW, we describe the mechanical design of the quadrotor.

As with any robotic system, electronics is extremely critical for Motion Control. The primary component is the ArduPilot Mega (APM) controller board which interfaces with an IMU sensor as seen in Figure 2. This controller is based on a

16MHz ATmega2560 processor with 128kB of Flash memory and 8kB of SRAM. The flash memory on board is used to log critical motors, IMU and algorithmic information. We analysed these logs heavily while testing our platform.

Ultimately we plan to communicate a large amount of this raw data to a ground station for further processing by the Perception subsytem. Additionally the APM contains 8 Input and 8 Output channels. We connect a 6 channel radio receiver

for manual control. Since the dynamics of a quadrotor are controlled using 4 counter rotating motors, we have 4 spare channels that will be used in the Rescue subsystem. In addition to the ESCs and motors, the APM interfaces with an Xbee

module that is the primary component of our Communicaton. The entire system is powered with a LiPo battery interfaced using a power distribution board (PDB).

DYNAMICS SIMULATION