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Low Cost Hexacopter Autonomous Platform for Testing and Developing

Photogrammetry Technologies and Intelligent Navigation Systems

Conference Paper · April 2017

DOI: 10.3846/enviro.2017.172

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“Environmental Engineering” 10th International Conference eISSN 2029-7092 / eISBN 978-609-476-044-0
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
Lithuania, 27–28 April 2017 Article ID: enviro.2017.172
http://enviro.vgtu.lt DOI: https://doi.org/10.3846/enviro.2017.172

Low Cost Hexacopter Autonomous Platform for Testing

and Developing Photogrammetry Technologies and
Intelligent Navigation Systems

Paweł Burdziakowski
Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Gdansk University of Technology, Gdansk, Poland
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract Low-cost solutions for autonomous aerial platforms are being intensively developed and used within
geodetic community. Unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming very popular and widely used for photogrammetry and
remote sensing applications. Today’s market offers an affordable price components for unmanned solution with
significant quality and accuracy growth. Every year market offers a new solutions for autonomous platforms with
better technical specifications. Commercial drones for amateurs are widely offered and presents a quality and accuracy
not available in past few years. In this paper an autonomous open source low cost haxacopter system for
photogrammetry and intelligent navigation technologies evaluation is being presented. The system was designed and
assembled for technologies testing and for educational purposes. The drone is based only on open source hardware
and software. All components are based on open source and commercial of the shelf products. That approach to the
drones construction provides a many capabilities to test, implement and execute new algorithms, solutions and tasks.
Providing basic configuration tools system enables students to safely perform elementary setup and testing. An
advanced configurations system tool and open source structure enables to execute advanced scientific test and
research. Paper presents results of designed process, system configuration and specification, technical issues that was
being solved during test flights and practical research results.
Keywords: drone, uav, photogrammetry, navigation, open-source, pixhawk.
Conference topic: Technologies of geodesy and cadastre.

Introduction
Low-cost solutions for autonomous aerial platforms are being intensively developed and used within geodetic
community. Unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming very popular and widely used for photogrammetry and remote
sensing applications (Kedzierski et al. 2016: 873–877). As stated in (Burdziakowski et al. 2016) a UAV
photogrammetry introduces low-cost alternatives for a classical solution. Commercial drones for amateurs are widely
offered and presents quality and accuracy not available in past few years. Based on the assumptions that a platform
should be able to perform a low speed and altitude photogrammetry flight, be able to hover and circle above
specified object of interested and provide open source resources for algorithm development and education purposes,
using design concept and methodology presented in (Burdziakowski, Szulwic 2016), an open source low cost
haxacopter system been designed and build. The system components are based on commercial off-the-shelf products.
System provides a basic configuration tool to enable safely perform elementary setup and testing, as well as
advanced tuning and configuration capabilities. All hardware and software components are based on open source
concept.
System design and components
The system is designed based on open source hardware and software. Presented approach to the UAV design enables
to perform any modification to source code and hardware used in the specific project. The market has been reviewed
and basic system elements has been chosen. System basic components are:
− Aerial platform – 550 mm hexacopter frame with built in printed circuit board (PCB), 30 amps electronic
speed controllers (ESC) for brushless motor control, brushless motors (MT-2216 KV810) with propellers
(size 10/3,8), flight battery – 10000 mAh 2P 4S 25 C lithium polymer;
− Flight control - Pixhawk (Meier et al. 2012: 13–18) flight controller (FC) with integrated orientation and
navigation modules,
− external navigation sensors – two GPS receivers based on U-Blox Neo M8N chip and compass module.
The second GPS receiver has been modified – standard PCB 25 mm/2mm ceramic GPS antenna has been
removed and a new PCB ceramic antenna 25mm/4mm soldered;

© 2017 Paweł Burdziakowski. Published by VGTU Press. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC 4.0) License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Burdziakowski, P. 2017. Low cost hexacopter autonomous platform for testing and developing photogrammetry technologies and
intelligent navigation systems

− Communication: radio control (RC) – 2.4 GHz Aurora 9 TX witch Optima 9 RX, radio modem 433 MHz
for ground station data transfer, video downlink 5,8 GHz 40 CH Video TX with battery and diversity
video LCD monitor for live video feed from platform;
− Data acquisition module – camera GoPro Hero 3 Black and 3 axis brushless gimbal for its stabilization,
− additional modules – on screen display (OSD) module that overlays flight information onto video stream,
based on MinimOSD Board. Mini PPM Encoder to encode PWM servo output ports signal of RC receiver
to a PPM pulse;
− System sensors and filter – power module for monitoring voltage and current from main battery. Low pass
inductance/capacitance (LC) filters for suppressing noise in power source created by ESC and motors;
− Ground controls station – PC commuter with Mission Planer Software linked with radio modem using
MAVLink protocol (Meier et al. 2011: 2992–2997);

a) b)

Fig. 1. The hexacopter platform’s hardware modules internal communication (a) and
(b) flight controller modules and communication ports

All elements and modules are connected (Fig. 1a) and integrated on board the aerial platform. The flight
controller internal modules and communication interfaces are shown on Fig. 1b.
Platform’s flight parameters
The system design (Fig. 2) was defined priorities like: redundancy in case of one motor or propeller failure, data
collecting payload weight up to 2500 g, vertical take-off and landing. That assumption determined hardware
configuration. The redundancy, in case of one motor or propeller failure, is guaranteed by 6 motors multirotor
configuration (hexacopter). Four motors configuration (a quadrocopter) is not redundant. In case of one engine
failure four motor multirotor will not be able to continue safe flight. Moreover, additional two motors enable to
increase thrust. The motor type MT-2216 KV810, in accordance with technical specification, generates 1070 g thrust
using 10/3.8 APC Propeller (Advanced Precision Composites). It means that maximum thrust generated by 6 motors
used in the project is 6420 g.
During a design phase it is important to take into account many different technical specification. In case of
COTS (commercial of the shelf) components, the market offer is very wide and every product has a different
parameter, price, weight and quality. In order to precisely calculate and select all necessary components eCalc
(Müller) online tool was used. ECalc is a online database tool with variety of components parameters delivered by
community or manufacture. The tool enables to create specific multirotor calculation, using selected component
available on commercial market.

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Burdziakowski, P.2017. Low cost hexacopter autonomous platform for testing and developing photogrammetry technologies and
intelligent navigation systems

Fig. 2. Hexacopter platform hardware configuration and components assembly

Flight controller – system heart

As stated in (Jha 2016), the UAV platform’s FC must be designed to provide smooth and stable flight performance.
Mainly, FC is designed to automatic control of angular stabilization, angular position and trajectory during flight
phases (operation modes) from take-off to landing. Used Pixhawk flight controller (FC) can run an open source
Arducopter firmware (Ardupilot 2016).

Fig. 3 PID controller to hexacopter (Liang 2017)

Basically, a the hexacopter stabilization is controlled in loop feedback mechanism, used in control systems,
named PID controller (proportional-integral-derivative controller) (Fig. 3). In this particular system PID controller
receives data measured by the sensors on the FC (gyros and accelerometers) and comparing that against expected
values to alter the speed of the motors to compensate for any differences and maintain balance [8]. The PID
controller calculation algorithm involves three separate constant parameters, the proportional, the integral and
derivative values that are to be tuned for a specified construction. The Arducopter firmware 3.4.3 installed on board
Pixhawk FC enables to perform auto tuning mode in which PIDs parameters for the platform can be tuned
automatically. This procedure takes few minutes, and copter during flying attempts to automatically tune PID rates to
provide the highest response without significant overshoot. Procedure can overshot parameters, causing copter to be
too responsive for input, or a “wobbling” effect, what must be corrected manually.
In this particular firmware, there are 14 built-in flight modes, 10 of which are regularly used. There are modes
to support different levels/types of flight stabilization, a sophisticated autopilot, or follow-me system. 6 of them were
programed for the research tasks (Stabilize, Alt Hold, Loiter, Return-to-Launch, Auto and Circle). Flight modes are
controlled through the radio (via RC transmitter switch), via mission commands, or using commands from a ground
station (GCS) or companion computer (Ardupilot 2016).

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Burdziakowski, P. 2017. Low cost hexacopter autonomous platform for testing and developing photogrammetry technologies and
intelligent navigation systems

Companion computers connectivity

The Pixhawk FC is responsible purely for a flight control, and its processor (168 MHz Cortex M4F CPU) is unable
to perform complicated computation. For testing and developing photogrammetry and remote sensing algorithm
other commutation devices are to be used. For this reason, this project configuration enables to use a companion
computer, in order to perform complicated calculation and pass only a navigation decision to FC.
The companion computer installed on the vehicle communicates with (and control) the flight controller, gets all
the MAVLink data produced by the autopilot (including GPS data) and use it to make decisions during flight. This
functionally enables to process live vision feed from onboard camera or other onboard data source (radar, lidar) and
process it to the specific navigation decision. Navigation decision is sent to execution to the FC. That hardware
configuration enables to perform and test the different modern methods i.e. obstacle avoidance, visual navigation
(Burdziakowski et al. 2016: 747–758), maritime objects following (Bobkowska 2016: 1–4), maritime and vision
sensor fusion (Stateczny, Bodus-Olkowska 2015: 1123–1128; Szulwic et al. 2015: 9–14), inflight onboard image
radiometric correction (Kedzierski, Wierzbicki 2016: 70–78; Kedzierski, Wierzbicki 2015: 156–169), lidar and
vision data fusion (Janowski et al. 2015: 17–24) and support works in structural health monitoring (Kamiński et al.
2015: 471–482). The most popular companion commuters compatible with presented configuration are Raspberry Pi,
ODroid, Intel Edison and NVidia TK1 and TX1. At this moment NVidia TX1 module is the most powerful
companion computer and delivers enough power efficiency to run latest visual commuting algorithms with support
of CUDA technology. CUDA technology enables to increase in computing performance by harnessing the power of
the graphics processing unit (GPU) (Błaszczak-Bąk et al. 2016; Nvidia 2011: 1–227), what enables to compute
visual methods in real time. That functionality is crucial to drones technology and allows them to interact with
environment.
Ground station and mission planning
The flight controller is able to operate with the ground station based on different architecture. The basic GCS
configuration consist of Windows PC with installed Mission Planer Software (Fig. 4). A Linux users are provided
with APM Planner 2 software. A mobile GCS is based on Android phone with Tower software. The GCS
communication channels can be established via radio modem for a long range, via WiFi module for a short range or
Bluetooth for very short range, all using MAVLink protocol.
In order to perform photogrammetry and remote sensing tasks, the presented GCS software will play a major
role. The software is divided on 5 main screens, able to control and configure UAV. Flight Data screen provides
information about current flight parameters and system status and messaged. Flight Plan screen delivers basic and
advance tools to prepare flight plans (missions). Initial Setup section is for initial set up and configuration of FC to
prepare it for particular vehicle. Configuration Tuning part is to configure the parameters how FC is control
particular UAV and how pilot is control UAV, tuning and adjusting PID loops. The simulation tool is designed to
perform Software In The Loop (SITL) simulation. It can simulate particular vehicle behavior without the need for
any vehicle hardware. From a researcher and educational point of view this feature allows for safe testing of
experimental code and settings, and can help students to practice using this Ground Station, mission execution and
perform simulated mission.

Fig. 4. Basic Mission Planner windows

Communication
A proper communication channels are crucial for UAS functionality. Military UAS are using a military licensed and
not available for commercial use frequency spectrum radio bands. For a commercial use, there is a need to establish
communication in ISM band. Industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) applications (of radio frequency energy) is an
operation of equipment or appliances designed to generate and use locally radio frequency energy for industrial,
scientific, medical, domestic or similar purposes. During last ISM bands have been shared with (non-ISM) license-
free error-tolerant communications applications (wireless networks, wireless LAN in the 915 MHz, 2.450 GHz, and
5.800 GHz bands). Unlicensed devices are required to be tolerant of ISM emissions in these bands, unlicensed low
power users are able to operate in these bands without causing problems for ISM users (ITU-R Report SM.2180).
License-free communication equipment is used in presented project.

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Burdziakowski, P.2017. Low cost hexacopter autonomous platform for testing and developing photogrammetry technologies and
intelligent navigation systems

Main communication’s device frequencies were placed in different band, in order to reduce mutual
interferences (Fig. 5). A maximal transmitting power is limited by ITU regulations. In order to maximize
effectiveness used radio transmitters a new tuned antennas have been used. Each antenna is tuned to a specific
frequency channel in order to reduce standing wave ratio (SWR). With the aim of maximize receiving radio signal
for 2,4 and 5,8 GHz band, a diversity receivers are provided. Diversity modules are checking constantly RF signal
strength from two antennas, and chose more stable and stronger one. Live video feed receiver diversity module is
equipped with two antennas. The first is an omnidirectional antenna for close range operations, and the second is a
directional antenna for long range operations. The RC receiver uses two antennas and determines always strongest
signal to control vehicle. The telemetry data 433 MHz band diversity is not required, due to a lower RF band
characteristic. This band is not that sensitive to interference, and lower frequency delivers higher range. The
telemetry data transmission is also not that important like vehicle control, and eventual data transfer loss not causing
potentially dangerous effect or vehicle loss.

Fig. 5. Information flow and communication channels

In case of communication loss (or other defined danger situation) vehicle is equipped in a failsafe system
(implemented in FC). The failsafe system enables to execute predefined command in defined danger situation. In
case of battery voltage drop to a minimal value, radio control communication lost or vehicle entered a geo fence
(defined by user denied for flying geographic area), vehicle executes automatically return-to-home (RTH) command
and lands automatically. A home position is a take-off position (precisely vehicle arming position).

Conclusions
A presented approach to this specific construction provides a many capabilities to test, implement and execute new,
recently developed algorithms, solutions and tasks. The project uses the open source hardware, which can be freely
modified and used to extend its functionality. The internal cross communication compatibility is delivered by the
open source protocol (MAVlink). This protocol can be implemented onboard small companion computer like
Raspberry Pi or powerful NVidia TX1 with CUDA technology. All software used in the project is based on the open
source initiative, in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to
anyone and for any purpose. That tactic offers students and researchers a tremendous opportunity to implement and
test new solutions and algorithms. Sharing tested solution with the open source community in scientific publication,
researchers supports collaborative development and generates an increasingly more diverse scope of design
perspective than any one company is capable of developing and sustaining long term (St. Laurent 2004: 193). At it is
proven in presented research, the open source know-how is able to deliver a full working solutions to the UAV
technology for a research community with a significant costs reduce.
Author declare that there is no competing financial, professional or personal interests from other parties, as far
as presented research is concerned. Research founded form own sources.

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