Design of Autonomous Smartphone Based Quadrotor and Implementation of Navigation and Guidance Systems

This work discusses the design of a novel smartphone-based autopilot for quadrotor aerial platforms and the results of its flight tests. The proposed solution consists of two different layers, a low-level navigation and control layer and a high-level human-robot communication layer. The low-level navigation system uses nonlinear complementary filters for position, velocity and attitude estimation based on low-cost sensors. The structure of the filter allows a straightforward implementation without need of high performance signal processing. A nonlinear flight controller is used for the quadrotor stability and trajectory tracking. This controller demonstrates also the ability of the guidance system in the high-level layer to provide effective waypoint navigation capabilities for the quadrotor drone. The waypoints can be defined remotely using a human-robot interface that is able to receive commands and to send information to a human operator throughout a web-based social network, i.e. Twitter. The performances of the proposed solution are evaluated by means of flight tests and are compared to the results derived from a more traditional approach (i.e. PX4 controller) used for quadrotor tracking and control.