On the Evaluation of the Crazyflie Modular Quadcopter System

Abstract

In recent years, quadcopters have become popular research platforms in the fields of robotics and control engineering. As a response to the academic community's needs, several open-source hardware and software platforms have emerged with the aim to impose as de-facto development tools. One of these platforms is represented by Crazyflie 2.0, a nano class quadcopter that was used in research projects that span from control architecture designs to high-level swarm synchronization.This paper presents a study of the control architecture employed in the stock firmware. Based on the mathematical model, the dynamic behaviour is thoroughly evaluated to understand the deviation between ideal and real evolution. A comprehensive phase of parameters tuning is conducted and multiple scenarios for real-time testing are employed. These scenarios comply in tracking predefined patterns, the quadcopter's evolution being tracked via a RGB-D sensor.The proposed evaluation procedure can be easily replicated and represents a very important step in obtaining accurate real-time results.