Hey guys!
Just wanted to introduce ourselves and our project to the forum. Were a design team at UIC building a drone that will take off and fly to a radio station. We bought a small 250 quadcopter that were going to control with an arduino, ESCs, and some RF sensors.
Our goal is to have the drone take off and hover at about 10 meters, search for an RF beacon ~100m away, fly to it, and land.
We're all solid programmers and have used arduinos and other MCs before for smaller projects, however this one is by far our most ambitious.
We plan to post some pictures of our progress, along with gathering some feedback and advice from you guys. Were looking forward to the project and becoming part of your community!
Apologies,
UIC - University of Illinois at Chicago - we're getting our undergraduates in Electrical Engineering
ESC - Electronic Speed Controller
RF - Radio Frequency
MC - micro controller
JAM - our initials
We didn't want to bog anyone down by being too wordy =]
This thread would be better suited to the "Exhibition / Gallery" section of the forums, rather than "Project Guidance", if you don't have any questions/problems.
Perhaps you can ask if the moderators can move it for you.
Estimating range to a single beacon is virtually impossible using signal strength alone.
Direction needs a very directional aerial which can be large unless you use millimetre wavelength signals.
This technology is tricky, normally requiring a military type budget.
You might consider using infra red led,s like the roomba vacuum robots do.
EDIt
UIC and JAM are the ones .
The rest are mostly known.
About the only way to achieve this is to have the beacon transmit its latitude and longitude and have a gps receiver on the drone that flies to the received coordinates.
That will get you somewhere around 5 - 10 metres of the beacon.
If you need better than this , it gets hard and expensive as you need differential gps .
