Development and Implementation of an Autonomous Quadcopter Drone

In this paper, we present the procedure of design, implementation and testing of an autonomous drone built on existing open-source quadcopter frame. The system combines a Pixhawk 6C flight controller running the PX4 firmware with a Raspberry Pi companion computer. The flight control stack is managed via MAVROS, which provides the communication bridge between ROS Noetic and the MAVLink-based PX4 flight firmware. All control commands, such as pose setpoints, are sent from the Raspberry Pi to the Pixhawk through a serial telemetry link. The drone system also used the GPS module and the propulsion system which contains the brushless motors. The effectiveness of the developed drone was evaluated both in the simulation and in the real-world scenarios. Simulated tests were conducted using Gazebo and PX4’s Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) environment, while real-world testing included indoor flights using visual localization and outdoor GPS-based navigation. Telemetry and localization data were visualized in RViz using ROS topics. The drone was capable of executing autonomous circular trajectories in offboard mode using the setpoint positions and maintaining a stable flight throughout various test scenarios.