A systems approach for the development of a quadrotor aircraft

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a quadrotor aircraft autopilot. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly important in surveillance operations. As more aircraft are operated in one location, they utilize large amounts of communications bandwidth. Providing UAVs with a degree of autonomy alleviates this problem. Our autopilot is designed to allow a UAV to take off, transit from one location to another while receiving only a position data feed, and land at the desired location. The position data is obtained from an OptiTrack optical array and is fed to the quadrotor in order to simulate a GPS feed. The eventual application for this system is to be able to operate several autonomous aircraft in concert in order to study their interaction and behaviour.