sdmay24-32 Senior Design - MicroCART

Project Overview

The Microprocessor Controlled Aerial Robotics Team, or MicroCART, has been building aerial robots at Iowa State University since 1998. Our team is improving the quality and ease of quadcopter research in the following ways:

Creating a more reliable and intuitive system for students taking CPRE 488, and improving system based on student feedback.

Implementing a quadcopter research platform with a multicore processor to show interesting demos to prospective ISU students.

Improving documentation for future teams and other researchers through wiki pages and YouTube videos.

Senior Design Project Poster

Link to MicroCart YouTube Channel

(Link to 492 Midterm Report Video)

Final Project Demonstration Video

MP-4 Improvements

Machine Problem 4 (MP-4) is a lab delivered within the CPRE 488 Embedded Systems Design course. This lab aims to teach students about the basics of control systems theory as well as to help build more general skills pertaining to embedded systems. A task for this year's team was to complete the lab and search for ways to improve both the infrastructure and workflow for students taking CPRE 488.

Fly-Pi Development

The second largest aspect of our project deals with programming a Raspberry Pi in order to drive the firmware within the drones we are currently using for class labs and research. A big portion of the work in need of completion this semester pertains to the need to figure out how to partition the four cores on the Raspberry Pi in order to run two operating systems at once (BareMetal and FreeRTOS)