Design and Implementation of Autonomous Quadcopter using SITL Simulator
Hasan Qays, Bassim Abdulbaki Jumaa, Aymen Dawood Salman, Syed Omar, Faruk Towaha, Clerk Maxwell, D Muhammad, M Swarnaker, Arifuzzaman, Alberto Lisanti, Giorgio Venezia, Terry Kilby, Belinda Kilby, Yasir Ashraf, Abd Rahman1, Mohammad Taghi Hajibeigy1, Abdulkareem Shafiq, Mahdi Al-Obaidi1, Kean
Abstract
In recent years Quadcopter has been used in many applications such as military, security & surveillance, service delivery, disaster rescue and much more due to its flexibility of flying. In this paper, Quadcopter will be used for mail delivery between many locations that is received from the end user. The Quadcopter will execute an autonomous flight using the concept of companion PC. Raspberry PI 3 (RPI3) will control the Quadcopter by command the controller of the drone (Pixhawk) by using DroneKit-Python API to send MAVLink messages to the Ardupilot. This concept is useful to perform an additional task to the autopilot and provide such a smart capability like image processing and path planning which cannot be done by the flight controller alone. Basically, the idea has been stimulated and the code has been tested by using the SITL Simulator with MAVProxy under Ubuntu environment. The result of controlling the Quadcopter using Python script was excellent and give a motivation to implement the same script on a real Quadcopter. The implementation on real Quadcopter was perfect as it has given the same behavior as the SITL drone in the simulation.