UAS Sensors and Data Collection

Introduction Setting up a vertical take off or landing (VTOL) uav is one of the more complex aspects of mission planner, for programming a pix hawk flight controller. The vtol that will be set up in this blog is a 2.5 meter wingspan, custom quad rotor, with all four motors tilting uav. Figure 1. A screen capture of the firmware installation page of mission planner  To begin install arduplane on your pixhawk, using the install firmware page in mission planner, figure 1 shows the pop up window that should appear. Next once the firmware is installed go through each of the settings of the mandatory setup, including the accelerometer calibration, compass calibration and the radio calibration, but skip the servo output for now. The next step is going to the full parameter list under the configuring and tuning tab, and enable Qplane, which stands for quadplane, and allows for all the vtol settings to be shown. Then the frame style and setup has to be configured, these have t...

Introduction This was a study to see if drones can be used to create a map of the slope on a golf course green, to aid golfers in reading the greens. Methods This flight was flown with a DJI Inspire one, using a zenmuse x3 camera for the payload. The mission was planned with drone deploy and the map was post processed with pix4d. The fight was flown at 6:30 pm on the Winnetka golf course, hole number 13. The weather conditions for this flight were over cast skies, winds at 10 knots from the north. The operation only took 10 minutes from pre flight to the aircraft being packed up as it was mapping such a small area. The drone took 66 photos in a grid pattern over the green. These 66 photos were then input into PIX4d to process a map and a 3d model of the green.  Figure 1. A sample image from one of the 65 images taken by the inspire one in this mission Figure 2. A map of where the photos were taken during the flight  and a map of the flight path Resu...

Over view Test flying the VTOL with the tilt mechanisms designed in a prior blog (link). This vtol design is a tricopter with the front two motors being able to tilt and the back motor is stationary. The vtol uses a pixhawk autopilot to preform the flight controller operations. The vtol currently runs on 3 iflight xing 2814 1100kv motors with 9 inch by 5 pitch tri-blade propellers. Each motor produces a maximum of 2 kg of thrust, and the vtol has and all up weight of 2kg so it has a thrust to weight ratio of 3:1. The current operation of the vtol is without the full fuselage and espionage as those are still being manufactured. The first flights  The first flight took place on 4/5/2020, this inital flight was not with the motors listed above, but with the motors listed in the vtol tilt mechanism blog. While the vtol was able to fly, it did not hover for long, as it was severely under powered. Being under powered lead to some unstable characteristics in flight but the proof of ...

Crew resource management (CRM) is critical in any aviation operation, but is rarely implemented when it comes to uas operations. Making sure that each person in a crew is doing their job is critical in a uas operation, especially in a complex operation where each crew member is doing a different job.  An example mission is to film a wedding on a beach with a dji inspire 2 with a zenmuse X7. This operation cannot be done with just one person as they would be to task saturated, as they cannot easily operate the drone, change the camera settings and watch where the drone is flying over. You need at least two people for this operation, but it is highly recommended to have three. The three people would be a remote pilot in command, a sensor operator and a visual observer. Each person has their own task to do, as well as communicating with others about their task. Remote pilot in command (PIC) The PIC is in charge of operating the aircraft safely and within the bounds of the FAA reg...

Introduction A project that I have been working on needed a Vertical takeoff or landing (VTOL)  tilt mechanism for the the front 2 motors, so here is how I went about designing and testing it. It can be challenging to hand launch a twin motor plane as you have to worry about both prop disc areas, while managing controls, and adding a vtol system can allow for operations where a wheel based takeoff is not a possibility  The specifications of the propulsion system are a Emax 2213-935KV brushless motor, that spins a 8045 prop, with a spider 20apm opto esc, using a 4 lithium polymer cell battery. This power systems is typically used in quad copters such as a dji flamewheel 450. The servos for tilting the motor varied depending on the design of the tilting mechanism. Figure 1. A dji flamewheel 450 quadcopter, with a propulsion system similar to the VTOL's system Goals  The goals of this project was to be able to develop a vtol tilt system for a uav that ...