LiteWing Maneuver Control System – Autonomous Drone Navigation Using Optical Flow Sensor

The LiteWing Maneuver Control System achieves autonomous drone navigation in GPS-denied environments by integrating the ESP32 DevKit v1 microcontroller with the Litewing Drone Positioning Module, which features an optical flow sensor. As the LiteWing ESP32 Drone moves, the optical flow sensor captures sequential surface images at high speeds, calculating displacement vectors that represent ground speed and relative movement. The ESP32 processes this optical flow data via a cascaded PID control algorithm implemented in Python using the cflib library. This control architecture uses inner and outer loops to regulate the drone's velocity and position simultaneously. By translating the sensor's dead-reckoning measurements into precise motor correction signals, the system automatically compensates for drift and external disturbances, allowing the drone to maintain stable hover and execute autonomous maneuver control without relying on external satellite signals.