Ankur Khetrapal

Quad Rotor UAV

INTRODUCTION

A distributed, modular, homogeneous architecture is presented that illustrates an approach to solving and integrating common tasks in aerial robotics. The main focus has been the design and development of the primary aerial vehicle, based on the quad rotor concept. Concurrently, the vision system, wi-fi communication link and the deployable vehicle are also being developed.

DCE Quad Rotor UAV

DCE's Quad Rotor UAV with the secondary vehicle mounted on top of the primary vehicle.

COMMUNICATION SYSTEM DESIGN

The Communication System for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was divided into two parts:

Primary Vehicle

The primary vehicle is equipped with an 802.11b Wi-Fi LAN adapter. The on-board unit comprises a Senao Wi-Fi USB adaptor of 80mW output power with 23dbi gain and a sensitivity of -93dbm.

Secondary Vehicle

The secondary vehicle is equipped with a camera that relays the video automatically on an 802.11b network. This video is transmitted to the primary vehicle. The primary vehicle then processes the video and also relays it back to the base station.

Base Station

At the base station end the system comprises of a wireless access point, fed with a 1W signal booster, an omni-directional antenna of gain 9dbi and an antenna mount for line-of-sight communication. The net transmitted power was checked to be within the total power dissipation allowed. This setup was tested for a range of approximately 3Kms with almost no loss of connectivity.

Data Flow

The management of flow of video was implemented as a web service in ASP.NET 2.0. The images are sampled are 7 frames per second and are transmitted over the wireless network. When the secondary vehicle is deployed form the primary vehicle, the web service relays the video transmission from the secondary vehicle, to application running at the base station.

The kill switch is implemented on an analog wireless link working at Channel 55

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For any details regarding the DCE Quad Rotor UAV project, please contact me at the following email address ankurkhetrapal AT uavindia DOT com

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