LiDAR Obstacle-Avoidance Quadcopter — Engineering_▢✕
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Drawing AMP-001 · Entry 01 · Jan 2026 – Present

LiDAR Obstacle-Avoidance Quadcopter

Aerial Robotics · AMP Lab, Virginia Tech
In Progress

An ongoing research build at Virginia Tech's AMP Lab: a custom quadcopter that senses and avoids obstacles on its own using directional LiDAR, with an onboard Raspberry Pi handling perception and telemetry so the aircraft can react without a ground link.

Objective

  • Design and prototype a quadcopter capable of autonomous obstacle avoidance in cluttered environments.
  • Keep the perception and telemetry pipeline entirely onboard so the aircraft reacts in real time, independent of a remote station.

Perception & avoidance

  • A directional LiDAR sensor scans along the flight path and streams range data to the onboard computer.
  • Obstacles detected in the aircraft's heading are turned into avoidance cues that are passed to the flight controller.

Onboard compute & telemetry

  • A Raspberry Pi processes the real-time sensor data and transmits telemetry back to the flight controller.
  • Running compute onboard keeps the control loop tight and removes the dependency on a ground link.

Status & iteration

  • Flight dynamics and stability are being tuned through iterative test-and-adjust cycles.
  • This is an active project — the write-up below captures the current state of the design.

Specifications

Platform:Custom quadcopter
Autonomy:Directional LiDAR obstacle avoidance
Onboard compute:Raspberry Pi
Telemetry:Real-time to flight controller
Lab:AMP Lab, Virginia Tech
Status:In progress
Tools:Raspberry PiLiDARFlight ControllerSystems Engineering

Attachments

Quadcopter research write-upOpen ↗

Full project report (PDF).

In progress · Researcher, scale 1:1Aerial Robotics