Abstract
This work establishes multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as viable microgravity platforms. Towards this, a vertical microgravity enabling maneuver suitable for multirotors, control and automation strategies, and techniques to enhance the performance of multirotors as microgravity platforms are proposed. Successful microgravity enabling maneuvers are performed to show the proposed control and automation strategies’ effectiveness using two multirotor test vehicles. Further, this paper shows that all the existing multirotors can be microgravity platforms and provide a method to calculate the maximum microgravity duration a multirotor can provide. Finally, experiments are conducted onboard one of the multirotors executing a microgravity enabling maneuver to observe the effect of microgravity on liquid level in a capillary and liquid meniscus shape in a glass cuvette. These experiments and the microgravity enabling flight tests demonstrate that multirotors can be turned into microgravity platforms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the two UAVs presented in this paper are the first multirotor UAVs to achieve microgravity and the first UAVs—fixed-wing or rotary—to conduct onboard experiments in microgravity.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.