Minidrone Virtual Lab | MathWorks Minidrone Competition

The Minidrone Virtual Lab. It's a set of lab simulations focused on the fundamental concepts of control systems, high-level logic design, and image processing. These labs are suitable for anyone who wants to get started with designing an autonomous system using model-based design or anyone who's curious to know about drones.

The lab consists of a mix of basic concepts of drones, controls, ad planning, and vision using Simulink. The lab is aimed at helping students to ramp up on the fundamental concepts and helping teachers to incorporate these concepts in their curriculum. The syllabus consists of four modules-- get to know the basics, control the minidrone, maneuver the minidrone, and minidrone perception using a virtual environment.

Considering the virtual framework, students can make mistakes and learn from them at their own speed without needing to worry about damaging the hardware. The four modules can be implemented as a two-hour lab session and supplemented with discussions and control, logic, and image processing.

To get started with the lab, the place where one can get started to use the model is by ensuring that the Simulink Support Package for Parrot Mandarin's is installed. One can find this by going into MATLAB, selecting Add-Ons, Get Hardware Support Packages, and then type in "Simulink Support Package for Parrot Minidrones." Click on Install. And once it has been installed, type this command.

And this example can be open from MATLAB Online as well. All you would need to do is just type this command in MATLAB Online. Once you type this command, you will see a MATLAB live script open up. You can select the module using the dropdown in the live script, and the corresponding module will be opened up.

Every lab has three parts-- highlight, that summarizes what is covered in the module; lab activity, which are the tasks to be performed in the lab; and next steps, which are the steps to be followed after the lab module. Now, let's go through each lab. The first lab is just to lay the foundation to model, simulate, and fly a drone. It would be to cover the background work that students must do before they start with actual lab experiments.

The lab activity covers watching a video and completing two self-paced courses to understand the basics. The activity then includes a few questions to ponder upon to ensure that students have understood the concepts from the background work. Let's close this module and the review module too.

Here, our task is to watch a video to understand the background and then test the model with various values of P, i, and D to understand and visualize how the controller's response changes with changing values of P, i, and D in the controller. This is followed upon by an open-ended question to think and reinforce the concepts.

After four word, the next step for our system is to move around, Maneuver. And this would be our next module. Here, we watch a video to understand the basics of state flow, which is a tool to help us design state machines, and then get into the task to get our drone to move in a square path.

The students are outlined with detailed steps to access the block in the model. And the students can add the states that they want to design the algorithm to fly the drone in the mentioned square path. The final module is about image processing and system integration. The students need to detect the yellow-colored box using color thresholding-- that's using the Color Thresholder app-- and then proceed to exporting this color as a MATLAB function to use it in Simulink in a MATLAB function block.

The students will use the basics learned in the last lab to detect this yellow object and then use it to stop the drone from moving and hover over the detected yellow box. The model concludes with a few questions to tickle the student's brain. The minidrone module lab is also a good resource to start learning the concepts for the participants of the MathWorks Minidrone Competition.

The students will especially find module 1, 3, and 4 helpful. Every participant of the competition is recommended to complete the Minidrone Virtual Lab. If you are watching this video and have questions about the lab or have suggestions for the content of the lab or you want to adopt the lab in your curriculum, please feel free to reach out to us at minidronecompetition@mathworks.com. Thank you.