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Captain Buzz


Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Faragher, Ramsey M 
Chick, Oliver RA 
Wagner, Daniel T 
Goh, Timothy 
Snee, James 

Abstract

Fully autonomous hobbyist drones are typically controlled using bespoke microcontrollers, or general purpose low-level controllers such as the Arduino. However, these devices only have limited compute power and sensing capabilities, and do not easily provide cellular connectivity options. We present Captain Buzz, an Android smartphone app capable of piloting a delta-wing glider autonomously. Captain Buzz can control servos directly via pulse width modulation sig- nals transmitted over the smartphone audio port. Compared with traditional approaches to building an autopilot, Cap- tain Buzz allows users to leverage existing Android libraries for flight attitude determination, provides innovative use- cases, allows users to reprogram their autopilot mid-flight for rapid prototyping, and reduces the cost of building drones.

Description

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM at https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2750682.

Keywords

Smartphone, Fixed-Wing UAV, Autonomy, PID control, Pulse-Width Modulation

Journal Title

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications for Civilian Use

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Journal ISSN

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Publisher

ACM
Sponsorship
This work was supported by Google Inc., the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; and CSR, Cambridge.