4.0 Our project aimed to provide Lincoln Laboratory with a basis for further development of the CyberQuad platform. As such, we tested our designs and implementations to determine their feasibility in future applications. Each element of the project - the interface, the localization scheme, and the documentation - provided useful information for use by future developers. This chapter presents all measureable data collected over the course of the project, as well as some analysis, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the features implemented during this project and to provide documentation for future endeavors. 4.1 PC The major section of this project was the development of the UAV adapter system that allowed for PC communication to and control of the CyberQuad. All testing performed in this section primarily involved analysis of this communication to and from the quadrotor. We measured the connection strength, speed, and robustness. This section also involves an evaluation of the performance of the various nodes created over the course of the project. 4.1.1 The purpose of this ROS node was to provide future developers with a tool provides a metric for how well the computer is communicating with the CyberQuad hardware. This would provide them with a general sense of which maneuvers are possible (complex versus simple actions) given a certain level of degraded control and communication. If this information was not taken into consideration, poor link conditions could potentially cause too many missed commands and a poor reaction time, potentially leading to a disastrous result.
4.0 Our project aimed to provide Lincoln Laboratory with a basis for further development of the CyberQuad platform. As such, we tested our designs and implementations to determine their feasibility in future applications. Each element of the project - the interface, the localization scheme, and the documentation - provided useful information for use by future developers. This chapter presents all measureable data collected over the course of the project, as well as some analysis, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the features implemented during this project and to provide documentation for future endeavors. 4.1 PC The major section of this project was the development of the UAV adapter system that allowed for PC communication to and control of the CyberQuad. All testing performed in this section primarily involved analysis of this communication to and from the quadrotor. We measured the connection strength, speed, and robustness. This section also involves an evaluation of the performance of the various nodes created over the course of the project. 4.1.1 The purpose of this ROS node was to provide future developers with a tool provides a metric for how well the computer is communicating with the CyberQuad hardware. This would provide them with a general sense of which maneuvers are possible (complex versus simple actions) given a certain level of degraded control and communication. If this information was not taken into consideration, poor link conditions could potentially cause too many missed commands and a poor reaction time, potentially leading to a disastrous result.
berard_petrie_smith-MQP-Quadrotor_UAV_Interface_and_Localization_Design.docx