A Study of Diving-Airdrop of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

The purpose of this study is the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle to conduct diving-airdrop missions especially in dangerous situations or terrains that are difficult for humans to work in There are many examples of practical applications of airdrops such as in general civil use military applications or humanitarian relief operations and the use of unmanned aircraft to perform airdrops can reduce manpower and resource demands This thesis both examines diving-airdrops and conducts actual airdrops in level flight for comparison purposes In order to simplify the impact of the payload on the experimental results we choose an object with a smooth and homogeneous surface a billiard ball as our experimental payload Furthermore we ignore the effects of the lateral force on the billiard ball during the experiment so we can simplify the 3D projectile motion to 2D projectile motion This thesis uses the center of gravity (C G ) of the aircraft as the origin of the body coordinate system in which resistance affects the projectile motion in the X-axis direction and gravity affects it in the Z-axis direction We modify the Spoonbill unmanned aerial vehicle (Spoonbill-100) to perform the diving-drop experiment For hardware we update the avionics systems as well as replace the two-stoke glow engine with a two-stoke gasoline engine For convenience we design an airdrop box to carry the payload For software we establish a hardware-in-the-loop simulation environment and design a controller that can control the velocity altitude and heading and the controller is based on the principles of fuzzy control The computer uses the air data to calculate the throw distance in the X-axis direction during the airdrop and applies GPS to identify the position of the Spoonbill-100 unmanned aerial vehicle and the distance between this and the target Therefore the computer can determine the appropriate timing to complete the airdrop mission Finally we compare the results of the hardware-in-the-loop simulation and experiments to analyze and discuss the feasibility of using an unmanned aerial vehicle to conduct airdrop missions as proposed in the current work

Date of Award	2015 Jan 26
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shau-Shiun Jan (Supervisor)