Development And Realization Of Quadrotor Experiment Platform Based On The Polarization Sensor

The main job in the paper is to design and implement a kind of quadrotor experiment platform based on the polarization sensor’s navigation performance testing. Firstly, we complete the building and test of the hardware and software. We use the platform to do the experiment with the polarization sensor. The possibility of applying the polarization sensor into the actual navigation is judged by analyzing the flight data.This paper first introduces the quadrotor’s navigation algorithms. The experiment platform calculates the body attitude angle using the direction cosine matrix which is updated by the data of the gyroscope and accelerometer. The complementary filter algorithm is used to deal with the profile information and reduce the error which is caused by the accelerometer’s noise and the drift of gyroscope. The altitude control loop, the height control loop and the yaw control loop are designed under the consideration of the PID algorithm.The hardware part adopts the modular design, with ATmega2560 chips as the processor module. The sensor module includes the gyroscope, the accelerometer, the barometric altimeter, GPS, the magnetic compass and the polarization sensor. The main role of the data link module is responsible for the real-time communication between the platform and the ground station. The power module supplies for the entire system.According to different functions, software parts of the experiment platform also adopt the modularization. Software parts mainly involve the initialization, the sensor data acquisition modules and data sending and receiving function. Furthermore, the sensor data acquisition modules collect data from the polarization sensor, the compass, the gyroscope, the accelerometer, the barometric altimeter and GPS. When the main program runs, it calls to different modules according to mission requirements.On the basis of finishing building the hardware and software, we test the flight performance of the quadrotor and the navigation performance of the polarization sensor. Through the experimental results, we can conclude that the quadrotor experiment platform is high stability, strung expandability, responsive and stable flight, and it can be used as an ideal experimental platform. We compare the polarization sensor’s yaw data with the compass’s yaw data, and we find that the polarization sensor has high measuring precision and anti-interference capacity, which means it is good enough to be used in the navigation.