Development of an Open Architecture Quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle: Manufacture, Hardware and Software Integration

The thesis addresses the development and manufacturing methodology of a Micro Aerial Vehicle of the Quadrotor (Quad-MAV). The software employed to design the electronic diagram, the layout of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and the embedded software of the drone, were from open source, allowing free access. The proposal of this thesis is to demonstrate that it is feasible to create a Quad-MAV with low cost components previously selected and using free software for the development of the product. To prototype, the PCB layout and the electronic diagram are developed on Autodesk EAGLE and then the Gerber files are processed by the LPKF CircuitPro to manufacture the coper wires over a FR4 plate and later the Surface Mounted Devices (SMD) are placed and soldered on their respective space over the board. The program of the microcontroller used in the prototype allows a stepped process to read the instructions of the Wi-Fi communication module and the data of the current state provided by the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), both processes, data and solve the control equations, allows that the system works. The code is written in C using the IDE MPLAB® X, the XC32 compiler and the firmware development tool, MPLAB® Harmony. The external modules, namely the Wi-Fi communication module and the IMU circuit, are coded and programed using as base the programs provided in Arduino. The experiments are conducted using a computer as a ground station to send the data to the Quad-MAV to ensure the communication and the integration of all the components in the final prototype of the board. Such experiments suggest that the construction of a Quad-MAV using low cost and commercial components is feasible giving access to an open source drone that can be adapted by the end-user to fulfill specific purposes.