Recap: After attending to several weekly group meetings, I officially joined UCLA Lemur at the beginning of Spring 2017. I decide to work on the underactuated flying robot swarm project. The main objective of the project is to create to a swarm of underactuated robots that are able to cooperate. There are a number of milestones for this project, first of all is to understand what do we want to achieve in our design and how to implement it. During the first several weeks of this quarter, I learned the current progress and plan for the project with Shuang. After that I came up with a detailed research proposal for the project and discuss it with professor Metha and other students in the lab. In the middle of the quarter, we searched and gathered papers about underactuated flying robot. We spent some time reading the papers and understand each one’s approach. We eliminated some proposed ideas due to the equipment that we currently have. We decided on starting from removing propellers from Crazyflie 2.0, which is an open source quadcopter project. After installing the required development environment and reading the online tutorial, we are able to control Crazyflie quadcopter using a mobile app while observing the robot states on the virtual machine client. In addition, we figured out how to upload modified code onto Crazyflie meaning we can change the controller code to make Crazyflie behaves the way we want. At the end of the quarter, I start to browse through the Github repository of the Crazyflie 2.0 framework. I am able to understand how the files are organized and identify which files we have to replace and modify. However, there are lots more knowledge required for completely understand how the code works. Therefore, I came up with a more detailed plan for what we will be work on in the future.
Looking forward: In the summer, I will keep on working on this project and mainly focus on learn the skills (C for embedded system, Free RTOS, etc. ) required for modifying the flight controller. At the meantime, I will work with Shuang try to understand and implement the controller for maintaining stability of Crazyfile while removing 1,2 and 3 propellers. The proposed milestone is to have the functional controller for Crazyfile with removed propellers by the end of this summer.