Design & Development of Intelligent Drone (Quad-Copter) for Security & Surveillance

Abstract

Security and surveillance is a major area of concern for any industry. To reduce the man power a low cost surveillance system is developed in form of drones. Drone is an emerging technology of 21st century. They are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) that are simple to model and control and with the integration of many low cost technologies a quadrotor can be assembled easily. The project aims at developing a quadrotor from off-the-shelf parts for surveillance based applications and also use it as research platform for tackling autonomous navigation problems, obstacle detec- tion and obstacle avoidance. Quadrotors key parts are its navigation systems comprising of hardware as well as software components. Hardware part for navigation system includes a combination of MEMS sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers and also a GPS unit. During actual flight if the communication between Ground control station and quadrotor breaks down then to overcome this failure of autonomous systems point to point link is formed for a manual over- ride. Pixhawk is the autopilot ight controller developed by PX4 group from ETH Zurich, Switzerland which is used in this project and the software is adapted from the ardupilot-arducopter (APM) project by the diydrones (www.diydrones.com) com- munity. The communication protocol used in this project is MAVlink which was developed by Loren Meier, head of the PX4 group.