Comp sci grads and Drone Experts!

Hi there,
What kind of famous algorithims are present in drones?
Furthermore, could anyone tell me if PCB's, microcontrollers and communication shields are taught in a comp sci degree??

Reply 1

bigboateng_

Original post by computerscience9

Hi there,
What kind of famous algorithims are present in drones?
Furthermore, could anyone tell me if PCB's, microcontrollers and communication shields are taught in a comp sci degree??

There aren't 'famous' algorithms, but there are popular ones but people are always experimenting new ideas. First you need to get state of the drone, such as its speed, Euler angles (pitch, yaw, roll), etc. You get these sort of data from electronic components such as gyroscopes, accelerometer, magnetometer, etc. However these electronics do not give you real values because they're not prefect. So if it tells you the drone is tilted 3 degrees it's probably off by a bit. So the first thing you need to do is use some algorithms to process/filter the data to try to get the true values. Filtering algorithms by itself is super hard to do. Common ones include high/low pass filter and another popular one is know as the Kalman filter, which is one of the best filtering algorithms, but again super difficult to make/code. Once you have the state of the drone and filtered out all errors from sensor data, you need to decide what the drone should do next, ie how much power to put into the motors in order to stabilise or move forwards etc. This requires knowledge of some control theory, but the common control algorithms, people use on drones is the PID algorithm. PID is one of "classical control" algorithms and is proven to work well. There are other ones such as Fuzzy Logic controllers. You might be thought how to program micro controllers but I doubt you will study anything to do with control theory, this is mainly thought in engineering. At best you will learn about some filters as that's required for mobile development (because sensors in phones are crap too) but you will not learn an algorithm to control a drone.

tldr: use Kalman filter for filtering out data and PID control to control the drone

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