Session H2B

Quadcopter Design and Implementation as a

Multidisciplinary Engineering Course

Igor Gaponov Anastasia Razinkova

Department of Mechanical Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering
Korea University of Technology and Education Korea University of Technology and Education
Cheonan City, South Korea Cheonan City, South Korea
gaponov.igor@gmail.com a.razinkova@gmail.com

Abstract—This paper describes a sample syllabus for the

undergraduate course whose main objective is the design and
implementation of quadrotor helicopter system. The class is
intended to provide the students with both theoretical and
practical knowledge in the areas of mechanical engineering and
design, system integration, hardware programming, and control
system design and implementation. The class has the objectives
which are very clear for the students, and gaining practical skills
in such a blend of several unrelated technical fields at the same
time can give the students unique experience of system design
and integration, which can prove to be very useful in their future
career.

Index Terms—unmanned aerial vehicles; education courses;

engineering education; systems engineering education

I. INTRODUCTION
The role of robotics and mechatronics in modern industry
have increased drastically over the past few decades, and many
industrial institutions have introduced the corresponding
courses or even majors into their educational programs in order
to fulfill the increasing demand in qualified specialists in these
areas. However, the fields of robotics and mechatronics require
from the students to be the experts in a variety of disciplines,
like control theory, mechanical design, applied programming,
and many others. The future engineers are required not only to
know how all these fields work independently from each other,
but rather to have both theoretical and practical skills in
integrating these fields of science and engineering in some final
product.
Unfortunately, it is often the case in many modern
educational institutions when the students can receive enough
theoretical background in their classes, but lack the hands-on
experience of the actual implementation of their knowledge
when creating some complicated devices or vehicles that
require a multidisciplinary education. Therefore, there is a need
in the courses which can help the students to improve their
skills when designing complex devices that require the
theoretical background in various engineering disciplines.
Design and implementation of such advanced devices as
mobile robots or manipulators can be a good example of such
courses intended to teach the students to apply their knowledge
in multiple disciplines at the same time in one device.
Figure 1. AR Drone Parrot quadcopter by Parrot SA.
A. Quadcopters: Brief Overview
Quadcopters (often also referred to as quadrotors) are
helicopters propelled by four rotors (Fig. 1). Quadcopters
represent a subclass of more general family of multicopters,
which are the aerial vehicles with an arbitrary number of rotors.
The first working prototypes of quadcopters were
introduced in 1920s [1], [2], however, they did not become
very popular due to many reasons, among which were
mechanical complexity, relatively large size and weight
(because of the existence of multiple propellers and their
respective drives), and difficulties in control. Quadrotor
helicopters design and implementation attracted a great deal of
scientific interest and research efforts in the recent decade due
to the advances in sensor electronics and emergence of fast and
compact microcontrollers and lightweight high-capacity
batteries, which allowed for the miniaturization of quadcopters.
Nowadays, the quadcopters from being just RC toys are
becoming an important asset in such areas as video
surveillance, search and rescue operations, and even art. The
role of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in everyday life is
predicted to grow in the next decade, which suggests the
increased demand for the specialists in the fields of miniature
UAV design and implementation.

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IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE) 2012
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Design and implementation of a typical quadrotor system
poses several interesting challenges, among them limited
payload and flight time, fast and unstable dynamics, and tight
integration of control electronics and sensors. All of this makes
it attractive to use quadrotor UAVs design as a university
discipline. Taking this course can teach the students to cope
with the abovementioned challenges, while having clear
objectives of both design calculation and the implementation of
hardware system.
While studying quadcopter design, the students can
increase their proficiency in the following main areas: payload
and lifting force calculations; mechanical design; sensors
integration; control system design; applied programming;
remote control and teleoperation.
After the completion of this course, the students are
supposed to have fully operable aerial robots capable of
performing remotely controlled flight. In contrast to being just
another test beds on which the students can practice their skills
during the lab courses, the quadcopters can be easily extended
or customized to meet the needs of certain applications. This is
a very important advantage of this course and can help students
to become more involved in the class, give additional
motivation, and improve their teamwork skills.
The class can be designed to incorporate two major types of
learning: behavioral (when the students are taught to practice
their skills and receive feedback on their performance), and
cognitive, when the students learn to apply their knowledge
when designing a device of an essentially new type, such as an
advanced aerial vehicle [3].
In addition, quadcopters capable of basic flight are very
affordable, with the prices per unit starting from about 300–400
US dollars, which can also help to promote quadcopter design
classes to be introduced into the university syllabi.
B. Proposed Class Outline and Technical Requirements
The class can be conducted in a general laboratory
environment available at the university, but the flight tests
should be conducted either in a spacious enclosed facility or on
the designated test stands, in order to avoid any possible
damage done to the students by the rotating propellers. In
addition, the flight in tight environments may result in a
sufficient damage to the device done as a result of the contact
between the obstacles and the poorly calibrated or inaccurately
controlled UAV.
In the beginning, all of the students are given the following
technical requirements for the quadcopter they are supposed to
create during the semester: desired vehicle payload, desired
horizontal flight speed, and operational time (time that a UAV
can spend in the air without recharging the batteries).
Satisfying all of these three requirements is not a trivial task,
since, for example, one needs to have larger motors/propellers
in order to increase the payload, which can negatively affect
the operational time. The requirements should be designed in
such a way as to give the students a chance to improve on some
or even all of the requirements by an efficient design,
optimizing control system, or any other means.
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The students can be then divided into the teams of three to
five people each, and the objective of every team will be to
design and implement a quadcopter by the end of the semester.
The duration of a weekly class can be between two or three
hours, with additional homework assignments, if required.
The most important steps in the proposed class can be
summarized as follows:

Modeling, design, and assembly of hardware (frame,
motors, electronics);

Motor control system design and implementation;

Acceleration sensor and video camera integration;

Remote control communication implementation;

Final experimentation and performance evaluation.
An example of class curriculum is given in Table I.
TABLE I. PROPOSED CLASS CURRICULUM
Week Topic
1 Introduction and overview
2 Mechanical design: calculations
3 Mechanical design: assembly
4 Control system overview
5 Communication
6 Single motor feedback control
7 Synchronous motor control I
8 Synchronous motor control II
9 Remote control tests
10 Acceleration sensors integration I
11 Acceleration sensors integration II
12 Video camera integration I
13 Video camera integration II
14 Final performance tests
15 Final presentation and evaluation
Instead of providing every team with the identical set of
parts, they may be given freedom to choose the propellers,
frame components, and even motors from several available
models, based on required performance characteristics obtained
at the design stage. This way the students will not be able to
simply copy the design ideas or control program from other
teams, since every different design will require different
controllers.
During the final presentation, each team is supposed to give
a short talk describing their aerial vehicle and the main
challenges they faced during the class. The teams are also
obliged to give a demonstration of their quadcopter in a flight.
C. Class Prerequisites
Teaching such a multidisciplinary course as quadcopter
design during the standard 15-week semester, will require the
students to be familiar with the following areas:

Control theory and its applications to DC-motor
control;

Hardware programming (microcontrollers, embedded
systems).
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Based on these prerequisites, the class can be
recommended to be taught for the junior students majoring in
robotics, mechatronics, or any other related majors whose
curriculums include the required prerequisite courses.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the
details of mechanical design procedures, whereas Section III
and Section IV are dedicated to sensor integration and motor
control system design and programming. In Section V,
possible additions to the presented curriculum are discussed,
and the work is concluded by Section VI.
II. MECHANICAL DESIGN
At this step of the design, the students will have the
following objectives:

Design the size of the future quadcopter based on the
required specifications (maximum payload, desired
flight time, etc.). The students may be given a choice
between the existing propellers of various sizes and
shapes – this may affect the size of the frame;

Design the frame in order to incorporate all control
electronics and motors, assuming the dimensions of all
the parts and components to be known;

Assemble the frame from the provided parts or
(optional) manufacture custom frame components
designed by the students by means of CNC machines,
rapid prototyping machines, etc.;

Verify the frame design by installing the main
electronics board, motors with drivers, sensors, and
battery on it.
The procedures for calculation of required lifting force are
well-established [1], [4], and following them may give the
students important skills of simulation and modeling with the
consecutive verification by means of the actual device.
The teacher can evaluate the students’ performance at this
stage by verifying performed calculations and checking the
quality of the assembled quadcopter frame. Loose parts of the
frame may make it sufficiently difficult or even impossible to
stabilize the flight, while selecting excessively large propellers
will result in the increased size (and weight) of the frame and
the power required by motors, which will affect the flight time.
III. SENSOR INTEGRATION
At this step, the main objective of the students is to learn to
process the data from the two types of sensors that are
essential for the quadcopter system to maintain a stable
controllable flight:

Motor position/velocity sensor;

Gyros/accelerometers.
If the brushless DC motors are used, like in most
commercially available motors, the velocity control can be
established via electronic speed controllers (ESCs) without the
use of motor velocity sensors. However, for the sake of
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gaining practical skills, the students may be asked to design a
closed-loop control system with a velocity sensor feedback.
If needed, the existing sensors base can be further extended
with the addition of the following sensors:

GPS (for path planning and following);

Laser range-finders (for map building);

Altitude sensors (to maintain constant altitude during
the flight);

Video systems, which may include stereo cameras (for
3D object identification).
With the addition of video camera to the quadcopter, it is
possible to extend the programming task to object/pattern
recognition, which is required in the majority of the
surveillance operations.
At this step, the teacher can verify and evaluate how the
students process the data from the sensors, since without
correct sensors data processing it would be impossible to
create a control system on the following step.
IV. CONTROL SYSTEM AND PROGRAMMING
The main objectives of the students when designing a
control system are:

Design a closed-loop feedback control system for
every individual motor;

Select the type and tune the motor velocity controllers;

Learn how to control the velocity of all the motors
simultaneously in order to make the quadcopter fly in
the required direction;

Program the central processing unit or microcontroller
to receive the data from the remote controller and
translate it to local motor velocity commands.
The main goal of the control system of a quadcopter is to
maintain a stable flight achieved by a precise control of four
motors driving the propellers. Schematic diagram of the
torques generated by the motors is presented in Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Schematics on torques generated by each motor of a quadrotor.
The device should be controlled as follows: in order for the
UAV to ascend/descend vertically, the speed of all the motors
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must be increased/decreased simultaneously. Increasing the
angular speed of motors 1 and 3 will make the quadcopter to
rotate clockwise, whereas the increase in the speed of motors 2
and 4 with result in a counter-clockwise rotation. Finally, the
vehicle can be made to fly in either direction horizontally: for
instance, reducing the speed of motor 4 and increasing the
speed of motor 2 will result in the frame roll, making the
device fly to the left.
Taking all of these control guidelines into account, the
students should design and implement the control system for
the quadcopter. A variety of microcontroller-based devices
can be used for the purposes of control, for instance, ATmega
series microcontrollers by ATMEL or Arduino
microcontrollers. The microcontroller unit can be chosen by
the teacher depending on required operating frequency and the
number of ports, desired programming language, etc.
At the end of the control system design, the students should
be able to control the rotational speed of every individual
motor and the speed of all motors simultaneously. The students
can either implement any motor speed controller they want or
can be given a task to tune a controller of the specific type
(PD/PID, LQR, or any other); this must depend on the depth
of the prerequisite courses completed by the students in the
given educational facility.
The teacher can evaluate the control system design by
examining the stability of the vehicle when in hover and flight.
In addition, the robustness of the quadcopter against various
external disturbances, like contacts with environment or lateral
air flow, can be also evaluated, since the latter is a very
important parameter of any UAV, especially during an
outdoor flight.
In addition, it can be very useful to teach the students to
handle various emergency situations that can occur during the
flight. For instance, the quadcopter can hit some obstacle with
its body during the flight, which may cause the vehicle to
perform an uncontrollable flip and lose stability in flight. This
situation can be taken into account when processing the data
from the onboard gyros/accelerometer sensors: the control
system can be ordered to perform an emergency landing
procedure if the inclination of the UAV’s frame with respect
to its horizontal position exceeds some angle specified by the
designer. Another possible emergency situation is when one
(or more) propeller hits some obstacle. This can cause the
decrease in motor angular velocity which will, in turn, result
in the loss of stability. In this case, trying to further maintain
desired angular velocity of this propeller may damage it or the
environment (which can be, for instance, human hand caught
in the way of the propeller), therefore it is really important to
slow down the rotational speed of this propeller immediately
and perform controllable emergency landing. The students can
check if the propellers are in contact with the obstacle or not
by monitoring the data from the motors torque sensors. Such
safety motor torque monitoring is required in a majority of
engineering fields related to human-machine interaction, e.g.
wearable robotics and exoskeletons, or in the operations in
which the abrupt contact between the robot end-effector and
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IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE) 2012
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the environment may cause damage to either one or both of
them, which includes mobile teleoperation, micro-robotics, and
so on. Therefore, giving the students an opportunity to gain
some practical skills in various emergency situations can be
beneficial for them when doing research not only in the field of
aerial vehicles engineering, but robotics in general.
V. POSSIBLE EXTENSIONS OF CURRICULUM
The suggested course can be easily upgraded or even
extended for the second semester, thus creating a progressive
two-semester quadcopter design and implementation class.
Firstly, various trajectory generation and tracking
techniques can be implemented, which may allow for the
autonomous flight in unpredicted environment. This is
currently a topic of a variety of ongoing researches in the area
of mobile robotics [1], [2], [5], [6].
In addition, not only every individual quadrotor can be
upgraded, but multiple quadcopters can be used to work as a
team, for example, fly in formations or lift some heavy payload
together, which would be impossible for a single quadcopter to
achieve. This is the subject of many ongoing researches
nowadays, and it borders on such fields of engineering as
evolutionary robotics and artificial intelligence.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, an outline of a quadcopter design and
implementation class is presented. After completion of the
class, the students will gain very important skills of design and
further practical implementation of highly-dynamic mechanical
systems, which can be extremely beneficial for the students as
the future engineers and researchers in the fields of robotics,
mechatronics, automation and control. When designing a
control system for a stable flight, the students can see on
practice the influence of various types of controllers on the
overall stability of the inherently unstable aerial vehicle. The
proposed class is very flexible, and its curriculum can be easily
modified or further upgraded to suit best for every individual
educational institution’s syllabus.
REFERENCES
[1] S. Bouabdallah, “Design and control of quadrotors with application to
autonomous flying,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Sci. & Technol. Eng.,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland,
2007.
[2] A. DiCesare et al., “Design optimization of a quad-rotor capable of
autonomous flight,” Major qualifying project Report, Worcester
Polytechnic Inst., Worcester, MA, 2008.
[3] M. Silberman, Active Training: A Handbook of Techniques, Designs,
Case Examples, and Tips. San Francisco, CA: Wiley, 2006.
[4] P. Pounds et al., “Modelling and Control of a Quad-Rotor Robot,” in
Proc. Australasian Conf. Robotics and Automation, Auckland, New
Zealand, 2006.
[5] A. Bachrach et al., “RANGE-robust autonomous navigation in gps-
denied environments,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics and
Automation, Anchorage, AK, 2010, pp. 1096–1097.
[6] UAVforge: DARPA and SSC Atlantic Collaborative Initiative [Online].
Available: http://www.uavforge.net/.
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