Hexacopter design for carrying payload for warehouse applications

Abstract

Airborne vehicles are gaining traction in research fields and in bringing it for commercial use. Multi-rotors for payload transport is one of the highly researched topics. In this paper, a hexacopter was prototyped based on commercially available components in the market and dynamic analysis was performed with constraints derived from ideal conditions, such as neglecting the effect of air resistance. The experiment shows the flight of the hexacopter to be stable with and without payload attached to it. Also, various computer vision methods were explored to detect and identify waypoints, in the form of gates, for the hexacopter to follow during its flight mission. The detection mechanism employed is HSV mask based filtering on input image and performing moment calculation on the extracted contour to determine the center of the gates. Localization of the drone with respect to the environment is performed with a monocular visual SLAM method known as ORBSLAM2.