This project was started in November 2008. The goal was to learn something about programming, electronics and control loops. Because I always need a cool project to learn new things, it was clear that something that can fly had to be built.
The project started as a "tricopter-only" project, but as I wanted to build smaller vehicles with more payload capacity, I decided to make some quadrotor, hexacopter and Y6 hexacopter firmwares too. My main interest is to build very small MAVs that fly as good as larger ones (or even better) and that can be controlled by wireless video link. I also experimented with autonomous flight in GPS-denied areas (video), and with GPS assisted autonomous hover (video). It would be cool to add more features to this project but I am pretty busy with my PhD research. But maybe one day I could combine my scientific interests with my hobby projects...
-- William

Contact: Shrediquette @ g m x . d e --- All content published under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany

Wednesday, 2 September 2009



This movie demonstrates how the tricopter hovers autonomously inside a room. There are three LEDs fixed to the copter which are filmed by a webcam from below. A Matlab script then makes the copter hover in place.
Posted by William Th. at 2.9.09

2 comments:

  1. Brilliant! May I ask, what kind of IR-LEDs you are using? It looks like you're screening the webcam against normal light with a photographic film. Is it that simple or have treated the film in some way?

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  2. Hi!
    Yes it is that simple. The photografic film (negative) is only translucent for infrared light. The IR diodes I am using now (different from the ones in this video) have 100mA and I use always groups of 5 LEDs (20 in total). That gives a lot of light.

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