UAV Lab: a multidisciplinary UAV design course

Aerospace control education can significantly benefit from actual hands-on experience. In most cases, however, such experience can only be provided to students in small-scale project activities. In this paper the experience of the UAV Lab course, held at Politecnico for the first time in the fall of 2018, is presented and discussed. The course, aimed at an interdisciplinary group of students, covers the whole design cycle for a multirotor UAV, from conceptual design to in-flight validation, with specific reference to modelling, simulation, identification and control. The course has been conceived as an extra-curricular activity, so the emphasis is not on conventional lectures but rather on hands-on experience in hardware/software integration, data collection and analysis and flight testing. The paper presents the course syllabus and organisation and provides an overview of the obtained results and the feedback provided by the students.