DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF AERIAL PLATFORMS FOR INTELLIGENT FLIGHT IN SWARM CONFIGURATION

Abstract

In this study, different multirotor UAV configurations have been studied for the selection of the best configuration for a small but heavy-lift multirotor. The coaxial/overlapping configurations have been found to increase payload in a small size. It was found that thrust could be increased to 90% for overlapping configurations with the proper selection of rotor plane angles. For coaxial configuration, the rotor thrust was found to be 76% of the thrust of the independent rotor. An offthe-shelf ARM-based Pixhawk flight controller with open source software has been selected and proposed to control flight. Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), which is a method of optimal decision making based on various criteria has been used and has been divided into decision structuring, criteria specification, alternative performance measurement, alternative scoring, and criteria weight. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) has been found a powerful method for MCDM. AHP and TOPSIS methods have been applied and compared. TOPSIS was found better and was applied to various commercial drone designs by assigning non-beneficial and beneficial weights. Normalized matrices were calculated along with Euclidean distance leading to ranking of drones. To control the selected configuration, pitch, yaw, roll controlling have been used. The coordinate frame equations have been applied to define quadcopter coordinates and display in 3D environment space. The rotational, translational, and equations of motion have been implemented in MATLAB. This is followed by CFD analysis of two selected configurations: one a quadcopter and the other a hexa-copter. Both models were validated with datasheets, and thrust calculations were performed in this study. Finally, using a proposed swarming algorithm implemented in Python, drones have been successfully swarmed. The swarming algorithm was successfully tested by using an open source simulator software running on a Linux operating syst