Design and development of automation system for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployment

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or sometimes called drone flying robot can fly thousands of kilometres according to the specific characteristics provided. Currently, many applications of drone have been obviously seen in the industrial activities. To accomplish those activities completely, the flight time of the robotic aircraft should be long enough. In practice, one of the most crucial problems is on the flight time, and most of the drones are powered by Li-Po batteries which only powers drone up to 25-30 minutes for a single flying cycle. The drone is forced to come back to the station as quickly as possible for removing and recharging battery, and of course, all these tasks are done manually by human. Loading and unloading battery from the socket compartment frequently where the force is applied with a random direction might destroy the contact area between the battery and the socket surface. This has the direct effect on keeping the battery in place, and the clipper or lock system might be loosed. These effects will let the battery fall down accidentally during flying. To solve that problem, this research proposed the alternative conceptual design of a small power station to load and unload battery from the drone’s mainframe automatically with a constant force. The proposed design platform provides six battery storages which can support the drone to fly back to the sky continuously without waiting. To do this, product design and development (PDD) concept and Kano analysis method have been used to generate the conceptual design where the necessary compartments are listed properly without trial-and-error thinking process. DJI Matrice 100 drone specification was applied to as a case study to scope the limitations where design of the small power station consists of two main functions: drone positioning, and battery exchange mechanism. For investigating whether or not the developed platform could support the load distributed during landing, the finite element analysis