Automatic Flying Drone Based on Arduino

The project is evolutionary as it came to III stage of building a drone, known as ArduIMU quadcopter which is allowed to fly automatically because of a bunch of sensors built within.

A GPS receiver is used by the drone to navigate where flight patterns can be programmed. A specifically designed Arduino hardware for autopilot tasks is the ArduPilot Mega which is the main board of the drone. The drone is allowed to hold fixed altitude and avoid obstacles using the sonar and infrared distance sensors. An LV-EZ0 sonar module is using an interrupt to read the sensor by using the PWM interface in a Port Change pin PCINT20.

The ArduIMU gets connected to the IR range finder Sharp GP2Y0A02 which uses a separate Arduino Pro mini. The connection is through serial port making an indoor-outdoor decision between GPS of range finder. The ArduPilot Mega hardware was used because of a problem of the limited I/O in the ArduIMU.

The use of 4 fixed IR distance sensor is a result of the first version where vibrations affected the stability as well as poor scanning rate while using a moving head with servo.

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