Design of a battery swapping station for multi-rotor package delivery drone

Drones play a major role in the fields of surveillance, package delivering, weatherforecasting, power delivering, wild-life mapping, and many other tasks also. ’Scope of themission’ and the ’Battery power’ plays an important role while using these drones. It is thatthese both issues will be caused to vary the ’Flight time’ of the drone. Instead of using humaninteraction for the battery change, battery charging techniques were implemented. Tobypass the inconvenience that happens in the battery changing process, automated batteryswapping systems were implemented. This research presents a novel concept for a batteryswapping system that uses the ‘Ceiling effect’ of the quad copter, which will stick the droneto the ceiling and swap the battery under the ceiling. The proposed ceiling-swap method allowsthe carry-under load of the delivery drone to remain attached throughout the servicingperiod. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and a kinematic calculation were done as a simulationand the prototype was demonstrated for experiments. ’DJI TELLO’ small scale quadrotor drone was applied to do the research work and to demonstrate the proposed researchfor future directions. Finally, the advantages, limitations and the future directions of theresearch have been discussed.

无人机在监视巡检、包裹递送、气象预报、电力输送、野生动物测绘等诸多领域均发挥着关键作用。任务范围与电池电量是无人机使用过程中的核心影响因素，二者均会直接改变无人机的飞行时长。相较于人工更换电池的操作方式，电池充电技术得到了应用；为规避人工换电流程中的不便，自动换电系统随之被研发应用。本研究提出了一种基于四旋翼无人机“天花板效应”的新型换电系统概念，该系统可将无人机吸附至天花板下方，并在此处完成电池更换。所提出的天花板换电方案，可使配送无人机在整个运维周期内始终保持挂载负载。研究通过仿真开展了有限元分析（Finite Element Analysis, FEA）与运动学计算，并搭建原型机开展实验验证。本研究采用DJI TELLO小型四旋翼无人机作为实验平台，完成相关研究工作并验证所提方案，为后续研究提供参考方向。最后，本文对该研究的优势、局限性与未来发展方向进行了探讨。