MRS Modular UAV Hardware Platforms for Supporting Research in Real-World Outdoor and Indoor Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces modular UAV platforms designed for versatile indoor and outdoor research, enabling easy adaptation for various experiments and real-world deployment scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a highly modular UAV design with flexible configurations, facilitating transition from simulation to real-world applications with minimal effort.

Findings

Demonstrated versatility through numerous real-robot experiments

Showcased adaptability with different actuator and sensor setups

Provided detailed mechanical and electrical design guidelines

Abstract

This paper presents a family of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) platforms designed for a diverse range of indoor and outdoor applications. The proposed UAV design is highly modular in terms of used actuators, sensor configurations, and even UAV frames. This allows to achieve, with minimal effort, a proper experimental setup for single, as well as, multi robot scenarios. Presented platforms are intended to facilitate the transition from simulations, and simplified laboratory experiments, into the deployment of aerial robots into uncertain and hard-to-model real-world conditions. We present mechanical designs, electric configurations, and dynamic models of the UAVs, followed by numerous recommendations and technical details required for building such a fully autonomous UAV system for experimental verification of scientific achievements. To show strength and high variability of the proposed system, we present results of tens of completely different real-robot experiments in various environments using distinct actuator and sensory configurations.