fyp diary - 1

I guess I kind of leaving this blog to its own for the past few months due to my studies and all. Well before it changed to a secondary forest I better do something to it. Noticed a good way to keep it 'alive' and keep the insects away is to put my studies in the blog.

So beware for everyone who hates studies, the posts for the next 1 year will be 'approximately' completely filled with my fyp (final year project) diary.


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Let me start the first page:

Even before I have entered year 4 officially, initiatively I approach my favourite professor Ben Chen for doing my fyp for him next semester. He was happy that I finally decided to join the NUS UAV team and welcomed me with both arms. He has assigned me a project manager - Guowei, who is a researcher in the NUS UAV team.

The first meeting was held yesterday in the lab as Guowei explained to us (my another teammate, Ronald) our task for the fyp. The main purpose of this project is to create a universal controller for all kind of UAV. To start our design, we will use a 'almost' mini coaxial rotocraft as the platform.

In definition, mini UAV is applied to UAV having wingspans of lesser than 15cm while our first platform UAV will be around 40cm wingspans. There's some slight changes on the UAV helicopters they research on currently - it is a coaxial helicopter for us (me and Ronald). Hence there's some slight operating differences between the 2.

Guowei divided the task into 4 steps as follow:
1) Hardware design
- the layout of all the hardware, including the helicopter itself, the GPS sensor, the CPU for image processing, the CPU for IMU (inertia measurement unit), the IMU, the DSP (digital signal processor), a camera, battery/power supply, a modem for wireless communication. The overall weight that Prof Ben Chen set for us is, 200grams.

2) Software integration
- the source code to combine all the hardware together, to link the CPU to each components that I mentioned above.

3) Model identification
- to indentify the model of our 'mini' UAV, preferrable a nonlinear model to be more accurate.

4) Control algorithm
- to come up with a control algorithm to drive the UAV.

Since Ronald is incharge of all the hardware, he'll be working on 1 and 3. I will be working on 2 and 4 in the same time. We are still lacking of a groupmate who can do image processing to process the video.

Guowei sent us a few material to read up during the holiday, including his own PhD thesis on small scale UAV project. Really appreciate his effort so much that he has created a very good platform for us to design our 'mini' UAV which named as PetitLion by him.

Reading up his thesis so far, I guess for my part, I will have to work harder for the source code implementation for integration part. It might be bored in the process but the overall result at last, I believed it will worth everything.

Prof Ben Chen told us about a competition for next year March, the Singapore's Amazing Flight competition, and he simply want us to get gold medal for this because we have the best fascilities and resources for this project in Singapore. This is our aim for the project.

NUS first UAV - HeLion, designed by Guowei and co.