• ardupilot
• autopilot
• camera
• coaxial helicopter
• control system
• Mars environment
• simulation

The objective of this master thesis work was the development of an initial custom-made control system for a Mars helicopter prototype. Given the open-source code of ArduPilot, it was essential to understand how to adapt it to the particular conditions required by the case, e.g., the different atmospheric pressure with respect to the Earth or the absence of a GPS signal.
The initial purpose of this project consisted in trying to manually control the helicopter using a radio transmitter. Once this was achieved, a first autonomous control of the helicopter was developed: using a camera attached to the helicopter, it was possible to control the vehicle without the radio transmitter. During this phase, QR codes were used with the aim to adjust the controls so that the helicopter could align itself with the QR code it saw.
At the end of the work, some tests were conducted to validate the performance of the developed autonomous control. In particular, it was seen that by placing a QR code at different distances from the vehicle, the helicopter swashplates moved correctly following the references provided by the camera.
The last activity performed was, in order to simulate a flight in a representative Martian environment, an attitude and velocity control simulation exploiting Matlab&Simulink tool.