The MOVA system is a composite system of VTOL aircraft and onboard manipulator. It is designed to be treated as a manipulator with unrestrained workspace so that the structure details can be transparent to end users who cares more about performing desired application task in more abstracted level.
Among all the UAV platforms, the quadrotor UAV is specially interesting because its more straight forward (than normal helicopters) dynamics which eases theoretical works and lower cost due to the structure simplicity. We are using the Draganfly quadrotor for experiment. The IMU sensor we are using is MIDG II from microbotics. We utilize the original R/C controller interface for control and use a pair of data modem as IMU feedback channel. All the calculation for control is implemented on a base station powered by a PC with QNX OS and QMotor software. This configuration has its advantage in swiftness for the development of control program. Any changes are effective just after a recompile, and the online parameter tuning save a lot of time. However, the down side is that it introduces undesired delay into the system which dampen the system performance.