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UniQuad: A Unified and Versatile Quadrotor Platform Series for UAV Research and Application

Yichen Zhang, Xinyi Chen, Peize Liu, Junzhe Wang, Hetai Zou, Neng Pan, Fei Gao, Shaojie Shen

TL;DR

The paper tackles the engineering overhead of customizing quadrotor hardware for diverse tasks by introducing UniQuad, a unified, modular platform with a three-layer design and four reference configurations. It provides open-source BOM and CAD resources, enabling reproducible real-world deployments. Experimental results validate onboard trajectory following without external infrastructure, leveraging VINSqin on stereo setups and Fast-LIO on LiDAR-equipped variants to achieve accurate, stable tracking. Overall, UniQuad offers a flexible, extensible solution that lowers development barriers and accelerates real-world UAV verification and applications.

Abstract

As quadrotors take on an increasingly diverse range of roles, researchers often need to develop new hardware platforms tailored for specific tasks, introducing significant engineering overhead. In this article, we introduce the UniQuad series, a unified and versatile quadrotor platform series that offers high flexibility to adapt to a wide range of common tasks, excellent customizability for advanced demands, and easy maintenance in case of crashes. This project is fully open-source at https://hkust-aerial-robotics.github.io/UniQuad.

UniQuad: A Unified and Versatile Quadrotor Platform Series for UAV Research and Application

TL;DR

The paper tackles the engineering overhead of customizing quadrotor hardware for diverse tasks by introducing UniQuad, a unified, modular platform with a three-layer design and four reference configurations. It provides open-source BOM and CAD resources, enabling reproducible real-world deployments. Experimental results validate onboard trajectory following without external infrastructure, leveraging VINSqin on stereo setups and Fast-LIO on LiDAR-equipped variants to achieve accurate, stable tracking. Overall, UniQuad offers a flexible, extensible solution that lowers development barriers and accelerates real-world UAV verification and applications.

Abstract

As quadrotors take on an increasingly diverse range of roles, researchers often need to develop new hardware platforms tailored for specific tasks, introducing significant engineering overhead. In this article, we introduce the UniQuad series, a unified and versatile quadrotor platform series that offers high flexibility to adapt to a wide range of common tasks, excellent customizability for advanced demands, and easy maintenance in case of crashes. This project is fully open-source at https://hkust-aerial-robotics.github.io/UniQuad.
Paper Structure (4 sections, 2 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 4 sections, 2 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The UniQuad Series
  3. Experiments
  4. Conclusions

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: The quadrotor platforms in UniQuad series provided in this article, namely Uni250L, Uni127C, Uni350CL and Uni250C from left to right.
  • Figure 2: Experiment results of the trajectory following experiments. The first row shows the composite images of the flight recordings. The second row illustrates the trajectory commands in black curves and the onboard state estimations in green curves. The average tracking errors($m$) during the experiments in ($x,y,z$) axes are indicated in each subcaption respectively.