Development of a mobile automatic low-cost antenna tracker for Micro Air Vehicles
Build an automatic pan-tilt antenna tracking system that always points towards our multicopter MART-ii during its flight tests. First identify commercial components (controller, servos, GPS, ...), integrate them, and develop an embedded application that steers the antenna in the right direction. The antenna itself is not part of this work.
The tracking system is required to localize itself (e.g., via GPS), receive and interpret network messages that contain the last known position of the multicopter, and to compute and apply the required pan and tilt angles such that the antenna looks into the direction of the vehicle. Towards that, the servos need to be controlled. The final system implementation should work fully automatic, without any manual interaction.
The solution could build on components such as the Raspberry Pi and available PWM driver boards, or on an autopilot system (APM 2.6) that already can read GPS and control servos.
- proficient in C or Python programming language
- fun working with hardware