Development of self-designed light-based obstacle avoidance system for UAV

Abstract

Since the time when UAVs were invented back in the 1900s for military uses, UAVs have developed greatly into complex machines. Employed in a wide variety of industrial applications, UAVs are also gaining popularity as recreational technology in the form of drones and quadcopters, such as the DJI Mavic Air and ZeroTech Dobby. As UAVs become ubiquitous, the public might want to experiment with making their own UAV, and a logical step after that would be to incorporate an obstacle avoidance system. However, resources on this topic are limited, or too advanced to be useful. Therefore, the objective of this project was to investigate the obstacle avoidance system at a foundational level, to form a prototype of the sensing system and to serve as a development framework for Do-It-Yourself (DIY) hobbyists. The project started off by selecting the system components, then investigating the necessary principles to effectuate the components and then assemble the components to form a distance sensing system for extracting data. Lastly, the data was interpreted graphically. The main principle studied in this project was the I2C communication protocol. The main components used in this project were the Arduino Uno (board with microcontroller), TeraRanger One (distance sensor), PM3510 (motor with a rotating platform and encoder) and Processing (graphical programming software). The result was a constant stream of distance and angular measurements extracted from the sensors onto Arduino and plotted into a radar using Processing. After this, future works can focus on using the data to develop algorithms for semi-automatic flight control.