Student report - Open Drone 2019

The purpose of the project is to create an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that could gather data mid-air from different ground stations depending on the mission. The UAV is ordered by AFarCloud and created by final year students at Mälardalen University from the Master of Science in Engineering - Dependable Systems program in the course FLA400. Autonomous UAVs are used more and more to gather data from the air, supporting other systems with data such as images, video, and sensor data. This can then later be used to complete certain tasks. When developing a UAV, dependability and safety become high focus since there is no operator. One simple way to increase the safety was to separate the flight controller from the data gathering unit. Data gathering and the flight controller is implemented as a separate system to make it easier to develop. Another requirement was to create an open source system, this results in that the UAV is totally modifiable to any task as long as the hardware and software is compatible with the specific mission task, some missions requires a camera some does not. The goal of the project was to gather data from a ground-sensor through Bluetooth. This was made possible by an onboard Odroid on the UAV, which could collect data via the support of Bluetooth. Each task was created after specific requirements, that was designed following ARP4761/ARP4754A. After the task requirements were created and fulfilled, validation and verification methods were performed to see if all requirements were fulfilled and to see that errors would not occur again.