This project was the result of a quarter-long project by myself and three other students to design, build, and test a manually piloted quadcoper with an autonomous delivery system. The final design was required to be able to fly for at least five miutes of manual flight and perform an autonomous delivery task involving two differently colored landmarks corresponding to two different deliveries.

The quadcopter was designed in SOLIDWORKS and then manufactured in the engineering class lab. The body of the quadcopter is made of ⅛" polycarbonate and supported by a lightweight coroplast frame to provide rigidity and prevent deformation during flight. The propeller guards are also made of ⅛" polycarbonate and are designed to be replaceable if they are damaged during flight.

The landing gear of the quadcopter was originally designed to be 3D-printed, but it was decided that it would instead be manufactured out of 1/16" polycarbonate in order to save weight. The landing gear is designed to both absorb some of the shock of a potential impact and prevent bouncing from occurring when landing, a common problem with lightweight quadcopters like this one.

The quadcopter's delivery mechanism consists of a simple styrofoam cup uses to hold the ball, and a server motor used to hold the ball in place until it is time for a delivery to occur. This was also originally designed to be 3D-printed but a calculation of the potential weight added to the quadcopter with the 3d-printed part would increase the weight by 27 grams, whereas the styrofoam part only added an additional 5 grams of weight.

The final design used an Arduino UNO R3 microcontroller attached to the top surface of the quadcopter connected to a Pixy2 camera and to each of the payload servo motors. Code was written to detect red and blue landmarks at a predetermined distance from the quadcopter and deposit the payloads accordingly.

The final protype for the quadcopter is shown below