Design and navigation control of an advanced level CANSAT

This paper presents design and navigation control of an advanced level comeback CanSat which is going to be launched to an altitude of about 400 m using an amateur rocket from ground level. The CanSat uses advanced and ultra-light microcontroller, pressure and temperature sensors, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyro, camera, GPS, IR distance measuring sensor, and RF communication module to communicate with the ground station PC. Three actuators are considered in this work for flight and ground segments control. They are the motor driven propeller, elevator and rudder. For the flight segment, parachute and attitude control are used to control the CanSat descent rate, attitude and heading. For the ground segment control; both the propeller and the rear landing gear of the CanSat is used for heading toward a predefined location on the ground. The rear landing gear is connected to the rudder rotational axis. An indigenous navigation control and electronic circuit design with the test results also are presented in this paper.