Syllabus

Prerequisites

Intelligence. Engineering skills. Good programming skills. Willingness to work hard. A subset of the following courses may also be helpful: ECEn 483, ME 431, computer vision.

Objective

In the quadrotor senior design project, undergraduate students design, build, and program quadrotors to autonomously track a ground based mobile robot using on-board autopilot and vision system. This project is intended to be both fun and to stretch the students' technical abilities. They are given the opportunity to bring together different aspects of their engineering education.

The following are the key learning objectives for the quadrotor Senior Project:

Complete a design project that requires the use of knowledge and skills acquired during the undergraduate educational experience.
Learn the basic business practices found in most industrial workplaces.
Learn to function as part of an engineering team.
Learn and practice written and oral presentation skills.
Work within a design environment with design constraints similar to real-world projects.
Be better prepared to transition into the workplace or graduate school.
Have fun.

Grading

Final grades in the course will be based on the following distribution:


Business Processes	20%
Labs	20%
Design Reviews	20%
Web page at end of semester	20%
Performance in Competitions	20%

Labs

During the first five weeks of class, teams must complete a series of labs that are intended to help them become familiar with the quadrotor. The labs are intended to provide baseline functionality from which the students are expected to build.

Design Reviews

Design reviews will be held in the middle of February and the middle of March. Each team will give a 20 minute presentation that overviews objectives, functional specifications, concept generation and selection, schedules and milestones. In giving the presentation, students should use powerpoint and should strive for professionalism.

Web Page

Every team must have a functional web page at the end of the semester. The web page should include all of your documentation from the business process part of the course. It should also document all of your design decisions, and explain your performance in each competition. It should include drawings and photos of the quadrotor, block diagrams of the code, and all of the actual source code developed in the project. We plan on doing the quadrotor senior project for at least several years in the future and the information that you put on your web page will be heavily scrutinized by future teams. To ensure that the web page endures, it must be created in the following manner:
1. Create a CAEDM group called quad08name, where "name" is replaced by your team name. (The CAEDM group name is limited to 12 characters so you may need to abbreviate your team name.)
2. Keep all of your team's code and documentation in the group space.
3. Create the web page in a directory call "www" in the group directory.
4. <IMPORTANT> Before you can receive a grade in the course, you must transfer the ownership of the group to Dr. Beard (caedm name is beard), and send him an email that the web page is complete and that ownership has been transfered. After ownership has been transfered, you will not be able to edit the web page.

Performance in Competitions

While you do not need to win to receive an A in this course, you must show up and be competitive. If the quadrotor never flies, and you flop at every competition, you will not receive a good score in this part of the course.

Reference Books

Castillo, Lozano, Dzul, "Modelling and Control of Mini-Flying Machines," Springer, 2005.

Stevens, Lewis, "Aircraft Control and Simulation," Wiley, 2nd edition, 2003.

Nelson, "Flight Stability and Automatic Control, McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition, 1998.

Roskam, "Airplane Flight Dynamics and Automatic Flight Controls, Part I and II," DARcorp, 2001.

Ma, Soatto, Kosecka, Sastry, "An Invitation to 3-D Vision," Springer, 2004.

Hartley, Zisserman, "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision, 2nd ed." Cambridge University Press, 2004. (avilable in electronic form through the BYU library page)

Miscellaneous

Honor Code Standards

In keeping with the principles of the BYU Honor Code, students are expected to be honest in all of their academic work. Academic honesty means, most fundamentally, that any work you present as your own must in fact be your own work and not that of another. Violations of this principle may result in a failing grade in the course and additional disciplinary action by the university.

Students are also expected to adhere to the Dress and Grooming Standards. Adherence demonstrates respect for yourself and others and supports an effective learning and working environment. It is the university’s expectation, and my own expectation in class, that each student will abide by all Honor Code standards Please contact the Honor Code Office (4440 WSC, 422-2847, hco@byu.edu) if you have questions about those standards.

Preventing Sexual Discrimination or Harassment

Sexual discrimination or harassment (including student-to-student harassment) is prohibited both by the law and by Brigham Young University policy. If you feel you are being subjected to sexual discrimination or harassment, please bring your concerns to the professor. Alternatively, you may lodge a complaint with the Equal Employment Office (D-240C ASB, 422-5895, eeo@byu.edu) or with the Honor Code Office (4440 WSC, 422-2847, hco@byu.edu)

Students with Disabilities

If you have a disability that may affect your performance in this course, you should get in touch with the office of University Accessibility Center (1520 WSC, 422-2767, uac@byu.edu). This office can evaluate your disability and assist the professor in arranging for reasonable accommodations.