LabVIEW Robotics

How to Build a Quad Rotor UAV October 6, 2009

Blog Spotlight: Dr. Ben Black, a Systems Engineer at National Instruments, is documenting his trials and tribulations in his blog as he builds an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), using a SingleBoardRIO (2M gate FPGA+400MHz PowerPC processor), four brushless motors, some serious controls theory and lots of gorilla glue.

I particularly appreciate his attention to the details, stepping through elements of UAV design that are often taken for granted, like choosing reference frames, when you should use PID control, and the genius that is xkcd.

Like most roboticists, throughout the design process, he has to wear many hats. I think Ben put it best:

I think that the true interdisciplinary nature of the problems really makes the field interesting.  A roboticist has to have at minimum a working knowledge of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science / engineering and controls engineering.  My background is from the world of mechanical engineering (with a little dabbling in bio-mechanics), but I end up building circuits  and writing tons of code.  I’ve had to pick up / stumble through the electrical and computer science knowledge as I go along, and I know just enough to make me dangerous (I probably don’t always practice safe electrons…sometimes I let the magic smoke out of the circuits…and I definitely couldn’t write a bubble sort algorithm to save my life).

My point in this soap-box rant is that in the world of robotics it’s good to have a specialty, but to really put together a working system you also need to be a bit of a generalist.

For anyone even considering building a UAV (or just likes to read about cool robotics projects), I suggest you check it out. He shares his .m-files, LabVIEW code, and more. Thanks Ben.