SquidCop: Design and evaluation of a novel quadrotor MAV for in-flight launching air-to-ground missions

Abstract

Energy limitations play a major drawback in aerial robotics. Regarding the deployment of a MAV (Mini-Aerial-Vehicle), depending on the distance between base and robot, most of battery charge is simply wasted in the robot round trip. Non-structured or difficult-access locations may detract from the task or be unreachable to a flying robot in terms of energy capacity. In that sense, a novel category of MAVs that may be in-flight launched may broaden and optimize the scope and quality of several tasks not covered by current MAVs and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). The originality of this work is to introduce a specially shaped quadrotor named SquidCop, which may perform autonomous and stable in-flight launching from a carrier aircraft. SquidCop is a low scale MAV fully designed by ART (Aerial Robots Team), which is intended to broaden the scope and range of missions, indoor, outdoor or both together. SquidCop is aerodynamically designed to offer passive stability during release, free fall and positioning at a certain point in the space. Overall drag coefficient is carefully calculated to provide correct sink rate. Still, structural integrity is guaranteed from stress. Such features ensure correct attitude angle and minimum usage of reverse power from electric motors. Unlike regular missions where MAVs necessarily use battery power between the base and the point of interest, SquidCop is intended to use minimum battery charge at descent. Hence, more battery charge may be available to be used from the very moment when mission starts. Low-cost assembly is suitable for extreme missions that may potentially represent the complete loss of the equipment. Complete analysis involves modeling, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and wind tunnel evaluation.