Build Your Own Quadrotor: Open-Source Projects on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This article presents a survey on publicly available open-source projects (OSPs) on quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Recently, there has been increasing interest in quadrotor UAVs. Exciting videos have been published on the Internet by many research groups and have attracted much attention from the public [1][7]. Relatively simple structures of quadrotors has promoted interest from academia, UAV industries, and radio-control (RC) hobbyists alike. Unlike conventional helicopters, swashplates, which are prone to failure without constant maintenance, are not required. Furthermore, the diameter of individual rotors can be reduced as a result of the presence of four actuators [8].