Colloquia

Summary

Corvus drones is developing a drone with software which is capable of autonomous flying inside of greenhouses. Next to that this drone is capable of collecting data. The first application of use is for germ counts inside of greenhouses. Other future possibilities are, for example, harvest predictions of tomatoes, strawberries, gerberas and roses, detecting diseases and detection of drought.

To make the process of data collection in greenhouses fully autonomous an autonomous charging station is desired to recharge the drones for multiple flights given that the inspection process takes longer time than the flight time of the drones. This station should take away the need of someone carrying the drone to a charger or someone changing the battery. With this the project goal is described as follow:

Design a drone docking station which is capable of recharging the drone and changing the drone battery pack.

This goal will lead to the next project result:

A mechanical and electrical design of an autonomous drone docking station.

To successfully achieve this, result the project is divided into multiple intermediate results. All these components together will be the drone docking station. To be able to validate whether the design corresponds with the desires of Corvus drones requirements are set up. To design all the components the desired functions are written down. For all these functions solutions are collected and organized in a morphological scheme. With this morphological scheme concepts are designed: 4 concepts to align and charge the drone and 5 concepts to change the battery of the drone. Using the specified requirements and a decision matrix the best concept is than chosen. This concept was than worked out further. This resulted in the drone docking station, with the battery changing module connected, as can be seen in the picture below. Next to that a landing skid for the drone to connect to the dockingstation is designed. This landing skid is also damage reducing in case of a crash of the drone.

To validate the battery charging a prototype is made of the drone dockings station (excluding the battery changing module). With this prototype multiple tests are executed to test the reliability and redundancy of the design. Based on this testing results and validation of the requirements it is concluded that the drone docking station is very functional. Therefore, it is suited to be used during long term testing of the drone. With the suggested recommendations this dockingstation has the potential to be sold to customers to make their data collecting fully autonomous.