Syma S107 Helicopter Hovering

Goal

Our task was managing to hold and hover over a specific point in the room using Syma S107 helichoper.

Capture Device

We used four 4 mm hemisphere facial markers to mark our helicopter- Cockpit, Tail Rotor and each of the Landing Skids.

The lab was coverd by Six OptiTrack Flex motion capture cameras that could track our marked copter and sample it’s location at any time.

The OptiTrack cameras were connected to a hub and then to the computer via USB.

We used Motive:Tracker software which provided us a real time object tracking in six degrees of freedom and integrated with MATLAB.

Application

We used a strong IR led that was hooked to an Arduino board through a breadboard.

After Processing the data we received from Motive SDK we serialized an Arduino command that will be trasmitted to the copter in real time.

Every command that was transmitted changed the “Pitch”, “Throttle” and “Yaw” values of the copter in order to direct it toward a same specific coordinate in the room.

Our main difficulty was how to redefine these three parameters above once the helicopter reaches the desired point. Since, it already has a momentum toward a specific direction.

We used some tricks:

We didn’t actually aim to the desired point in the room but to some midpoint that was located in between the copter and the desired point.

Once the copter gets located inside some critical radius from the desired point we started to use a revrse pitch and only allowed minor changes in the new values of the “Yaw” and “Throttle” for the next Arduino command.