WELCOME TO THE HOME OF TEAM BULLDOG

Here you will find a detailed overview of our quadrotor design, including all of our code - feel free to use it as a starting point for your project. We had a lot of success, especially in the areas of vision and state estimation. Please look around. If you have any questions, contact us - we want to help!    Team Members and Contact Information

A quadrotor is a four-propeller robot that can hover and navigate through the inside of a building. It makes decisions about where to go based on an onboard vision system, sensors, and computer processors. With no outside control or human interference, this robot can follow a target composed of LED's. Such capabilities are very appealing for a number of potential customers including military and law-enforcement.

To accomplish the goal of a completely autonomous, target-following quadrotor, we created and integrated several key systems: a light-weight, stable structure, a vision system to see the target and determine the quadrotor's pose with respect to the LED's, sensors to measure altitude, acceleration, and roll, pitch and yaw rates, a Kalman Filter to estimate sensor and vision data between measurements, PID feedback control loops to determine tracking error and make necessary adjustments to its pose, and a communication system to allow state information to be passed between the processors.

Nobody has ever flown an autonomous, vision-controlled quadrotor with all sensor, vision, and computer processing done onboard. We succeeded in making our quadrotor hover over a target while tethered. When we move the target, the quadrotor adjusts its position to be directly over and aligned with the target. And with a little more work (tweaking the controller's gain values, adding a wide-angle camera, and a little more testing), we are confident our quadrotor would be able to hover over and follow a moving target.