Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Lecture 1 Page: 1 Basic Ideas Safety Administration colintan@nus.edu.sg
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 2 WELCOME TO SINGAPORE AND TO NUS!
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 3 What You Will Learn Hand-fly quadcopters. It s not an easy skill to pick up, as you will soon see. Basic quadcopter theory and design. Quadcopter dynamics. Airframe types, motors, electronic speed controllers, propellers, batteries, flight controllers.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 4 What You Will Learn The Ardupilot Mega Popular low cost flight controller, with fully autonomous features. The MAVLink Protocol Packet-based protocol used to tell the APM and other flight controllers what to do. Also used to read telemetry data from the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS).
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 5 What You Will Learn Creating autonomous missions with Mission Planner Establishing Inter-UAS Communication Drone cluster case study
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 6 Safety UAS are DANGEROUS! These injuries were caused by soft plastic propellers. We are using hard carbon fibre propellers, which are even more dangerous.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 7 Safety UAS are DANGEROUS!
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 8 Safety DO NOT: Fly the UAS above people, including yourself. Fly the UAS over the pilot zone. Fly the UAS over houses, buildings or cars. Hold a UAS in your hands with the batteries connected and propellers mounted. Calibrate or tune a UAS with the propellers mounted. Mount the propellers without our permission or instruction. Carry over 7kg, including the airframe, motors, batteries, flight controller, ESCs and payload.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 9 Safety Powering up DO: Shutting Down ALWAYS switch on your transmitter BEFORE connecting the UAS battery! ALWAYS disconnect the UAS battery BEFORE switching off the transmitter! The motors can start unexpectedly. You can lose your fingers if this happens! Check that the flight area is free of all persons before arming the motors.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 10 Safety DO: Check that all your transmitter switches are off. Check that all wiring, straps and accessories are clear of the blades. Confine your flying to the flight zone ONLY.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 11 Battery Safety UAS use Lithium Polymer (LiPo) batteries, which are potentially unstable.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 12 Battery Safety DO NOT: Drop a LiPo battery. Strike or stab a LiPo battery. Leave a LiPo battery overnight to charge. Let a LiPo battery drain completely. Use an underpowered LiPo battery. Use a battery that shows signs of damage. Use a bloated battery.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 13 Battery Safety DO: Use a battery with the correct discharge capacity (e.g. 30C vs 10C). We will cover this in the next lecture. Inspect your battery after a crash for damage. Switch off the battery charger when you leave the room.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 14 Basic Terms Pitch, roll and yaw
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 15 Basic Terms Radio modes In this class we will only use Mode 2. Actually the radios are Mode 1 but we convert them.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 16 Course Structure Generally, lectures from 9 to 12. Sometimes I will lecture less and give you time to do your assignments. Flight lessons from 1 pm to 4 pm. You will be given assignments to complete at night. This is important: Each day s assignments build on the previous day. If you don t finish the assignment by the next day, you may be left behind.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 17 Administration Organize yourselves into teams of 3. Do this now. Each team of 3 will receive from us: One set of Hubsan X4 micro quadcopter. Hubsan X4 Transmitter 3 batteries One twin battery charger One single battery charger
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 18 Administration One set of APM 2.6 Autopilot Hardware APM 2.6 module. ublox GPS + Compass module, with connecting cables. Power Module. Telemetry Cable. Micro-USB cable.
Lecture 1: Basic Ideas, Safety and Administration Page: 19 Administration One set of Sparkfun Inventor Kit + Arduino Mega Board Arduino UNO microcontroller board. You will not use this. Breadboard, attached with the Arduino UNO. You need this. Wiring bundle. One pack of red LEDs, one pack of green or yellow LEDs, one pack of 10 kilohm resistors, one pack of 330 ohm resistors, many other components. You will receive one additional microcontroller known as the Arduino Mega board, which you will actually use.