Multirotor Drone Design and Control — DUET's First Flying Drone

Goal:
To design, build and fly a drone at DUET, which no team at the university had attempted before, and then to use it to film the first aerial video of the DUET campus.

What I built:
A quadcopter built from the ground up: the frame, four brushless motors with electronic speed controllers, a flight controller, a mast-mounted GPS module, a lithium polymer battery system and a radio control link. The team chose, assembled, wired and configured every component, then tested and tuned the drone through repeated flight trials on campus.

My role:
Founder and Team Leader of DUET Runway-71, a ten-member team of students from the Departments of EEE, ME, CSE and Textile Engineering. I set the project's direction, coordinated the build and testing, and worked hands-on on the drone's electronics, assembly and flight setup.

Challenges / results:
The project was entirely self-funded: the team raised around Tk 35,000 for components from our own pockets, which was our biggest hurdle. Our first test flight on 13 June 2016 failed because the drone could not hold its balance. After a long period of further work on its stability and flight control, the quadcopter flew successfully on 11 August 2017 in front of a large crowd of students, teachers and visitors on the main campus road. It was the first drone flight in DUET's history.

What came after:
The drone went on to capture the first aerial video of the DUET campus, presented by the DUET Robotics Club with technical support from G-Robotics. The project sparked wider interest in drones at DUET, led to the founding of the DUET Aeronautical Society in 2018, and became the basis of the drone-making training I later conducted at KUET and RUET for the Bangladesh Science Society.