Design and Development of Drone

A N Geethanjali
Nithin Krishnan Manav TP
Department of Mechatronics Engineering
Department of Mechatronics Engineering Department of Mechatronics Engineering
Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science
Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science
Chennai ,India
Chennai ,India Chennai ,India
[email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]

Dinesh Kumar Ms. N Seenu Dr. G Balaji

Department of Mechatronics Engineering School of Aeronautical Science
Department of Mechatronics Engineering Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science
Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science Chennai, India Chennai, India
Chennai ,India [email protected] [email protected]
[email protected]

Abstract - A drone is a flying robot that can be remotely

controlled or fly autonomously using software-controlled flight A. Problem Statement
2022 IEEE Bombay Section Signature Conference (IBSSC) | 978-1-6654-9291-1/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/IBSSC56953.2022.10037366

plans in its embedded systems, that work in conjunction with

onboard sensors and a global positioning system (GPS). UAVs A drone is a robot that can fly both autonomously using
were most often associated with the military. They are used in software-controlled flight plans or can be controlled using a
many applications like Photography and Videography, delivering remote controller. There are different types of drones with
goods, monitoring change in climate, surveillance and target different designs depending upon their application in disaster
attacks in military, besides these, drones can also be a very good management. The 72 hours after the disaster is the most crucial
equipment that can be used in times of a disaster. In case of natural time and by equipping drones at this time the area under cover
disasters like earthquakes, floods and fire accidents, there will be for management will be higher. This system also helps to get a
difficulty in locating and visualizing the disaster-affected area and rough estimation of damage and danger before sending in the
locating where people are trapped. In such a case, a drone can be rescue squad. Drones have the ability to take on roles where
used to visualize the condition of the disaster occurred area and relief workers and manned vehicles or ground vehicles fall
locate where the people are trapped. The drone is operated using short. Drones can be used for management after the following
ROS where the communication between ROS and the drone is disasters like, Fire, Earthquakes, Floods or Hurricanes, Nuclear
made. The drone can also be fed with image-processing algorithms Explosion, Gas leaks and War
to locate people and also the level of damage can be calculated.

B. Scope of the Project

Keywords - Disaster Management, Robot Operating System,
Drone, Unmanned Aeriel Vehicle Easy visualization of inaccessible area is possible. It also
helps in faster mapping of affected areas. The rescue team will
have an idea of the scale of disaster from drone captured
I. INTRODUCTION images. It will be comparatively easier to locate people who
are in danger and to search for personal belongings.
We know that drone can be used for various purposes like
film making, military and other commercial purposes. Besides
all these application drone also plays an important role in the
field of emergency management. Drone can be used to view
the disaster occurred area in safer way and method. They have II. ROS CONTROLLER
a real high efficiency in supporting emergency management. ROS is turning into the norm in mechanical technology
This project is about how the drone is designed and integrated programming, in any event in the help robot’s area.
with ROS for the purpose of disaster management using Consistently, an ever-increasing number of organizations and
mapping, path planning, image processing and other means of new companies are basing their organizations in ROS. Prior to
methodology integrated to achieve the task of finding and ROS, each robot must be customized utilizing the producer’s
locating the people who would have got trapped in disaster own API. ROS is for robots like Windows is for PCs, android
occurred area. The drone sends the aerial view of the disaster for phones. By having ROSified robot, that is, a robot that
occurred area to the viewer and it also locates the people in sudden spikes in demand for ROS, you can make programs that
that area. This drone could be a great help to the national can be divided between various robots. You can fabricate a
authorities to easily and immediately locate the people and route program that is a program to make a robot move around
also understand the seriousness of the disaster. They could without crashing, for a four-wheeled robot worked by
easily target the people in need of help without wasting their organization and later utilize a similar careful code to move a
time in physically visiting each place and look for people.

978-1-6654-9291-1/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE

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 two wheeled robot worked by organization B or even use it on ultimate cause of drag is viscous friction, turbulent drag is
a robot from organization C. independent of viscosity. Due to the flat surface the smooth
flow of air won’t happen when the drone is in motion. There
will be a opposition force due to this flat surface which can
also affect the flight time of the drone by decreasing the
III. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY batttery capapcity.

 Design of the drone The edges of the body is filleted and made as curved to
reduce the friction due to air flow and in turn reducing the
 Human detection using image Processing drag force acting on the drone. After making the edges as
curved surface it was noticed that the drag was reduced
 Testing and analysis of drone structure proportionally with the velocity of the drone as this is a low-
 Selection of Components speed drone.

 Selection of flight controller algorithm Instead of Lightweighting and having empty cavity on the
body of the drone, the body can be made lightweight by other
methods also. As the body of the drone will be manufactured
using 3D printing technology, Leightweighting can be done by
reducing the infill during the print. Reducing the infill during
the print will not affect the structural integrity because of the
mesh like internal structure of the printed part due to which
the printed part hold it shape even in extreme conditions.

A. Design of drone

(a)

Fig 1 .Image of reference for design

The reference design of the drone was taken from an

online website called GrabCad.com. The reference of the
design for the drone was taken from the given drone design
and we have made certain changes in the design which are
discussed below and came up with the current design used in
this project.

B. Comparision of the drone deign with existing design

The edges of the given drone design are flat surface which
can lead to increase in drag, which inturn can lead to decrese
in the performance of the drone. When a flow is moving at a (b)
low or high speed, the Drag force is proportional to the
velocity for low-speed flow and the squared velocity for high- Fig 2. Design of drone
speed flow, where the distinction between low and high speed
is measured by the Reynolds number. Even though the

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 (a)

Fig 4: flowchart of HOG descriptor

(b)
Fig 3: Dimension of the drone

C. Working of HOG descriptor

1. Take the input image you want to calculate HOG features of.
Resize the image into an image of 640x480 pixels (640 pixels
height and 480 width). (A)
2. The gradient of the image is calculated. The gradient is
obtained by combining magnitude and angle from the image.
Considering a block of 8x8 pixels, first Gx and Gy is calculated
for each pixel. First Gx and Gy is calculated using the formulae
below for each pixel value .After calculating Gx and Gy,
magnitude and angle of gradient of each pixel is calculated.
3. After obtaining the gradient of each pixel, the gradient
matrices (magnitude and angle matrix) are divided into 32x32
cells to form a block. For each block, a 9-point histogram is
calculated. A 9-point histogram develops a histogram with 9
bins and each bin has an angle range of 20 degrees. Each of the
9-point histograms can be plotted as histograms with bins
showing the intensity of the gradient in that bin. As a block
contains 64 different values, for all 64 values of magnitude and
gradient the following calculation is performed. (b)
Fig 5 : Unified Robotics Description Format
4. After obtaining the centre value of each bin, the values are
plotted in a 2D array. The 2D array is then convoluted with the
human like 2D array and the result is classified using the SVM D. Calculation of Drag
classifier as “human” or “no human”.

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 Drag Force is the resistance force of a fluid. The force applies a fully autonomous vehicle. The APM 2.8 has many interface
acting opposite towards the motion of the object which is peripherals and ROS is also one among them. . This is
moving submerge in a certain fluid. The drag force is defined extremely helpful for us since we will need UART telemetry
as the force which resist the motion of a body with fluid. port for APM and MSP430 communication.

2) BRUSHLESS MOTOR
𝐹 = ρv 𝐶 𝐴 …eq (1)
Where,
A Brushless DC motor is having one of the most important
FD = drag force feature of primary efficiency. Because its rotor is the only
thing that bearer of its magnet and it doesn’t require any
ρ= density of fluid
power. It neither has commutator nor brushes. It has
V= speed of drone relative to fluid permanent magnets attached to it in the rotor part and the
armature windings are located on the stator part. It uses
A= cross sectional area
electrical commutation to covert the electrical energy into
CD= drag coefficient mechanical energy.

Density of fluid (kg/m^3 for air) : 1.22 3) ELECTRONIC SPEED CONTROLLER

Cross-sectional Area (m^2 ): 0.0025

Velocity of object (m/s): 8.33 An electronic speed controller is an electronic circuit which is
designed to control and regulate the speed of the motor. It can
Drag Coefficient (cd): 00.7 also be used to provide the reversing ability to motor and also
the dynamic braking. It controls the speed by referring a signal
through any manual inputs and varies the switching rate of a
By substituting in equation (1) network of field effect transistor. By changing the duty cycles
or switching the frequency range of the transistor, the speed of
the motor is changed. Brushless ESC systems basically creates
The drag force is found to be:
a three phase AC power, like a variable frequency drive to run
the brushless motors.
Force of Drag (N): 0.0743
4) M8N NEO GPS MODULE

The NEO-M8N GPS Module GY-NEO8 is optimized

especially for the cost-sensitive applications, as it provides
with the best performance and also makes it easier for RF
E. Hardware components integration at a very low power consumption levels. The
futureproof NEO-M8N module includes an internal flash that
will in turn allows the user to install the future firmware
1) APM 2.8 FLIGHT CONTROLLER updates. This is a easy and simple to use GPS Receiver. IT is
the updated version of the hugely popular NEO6M GPS
The flight controller is the brain of a drone. There are many Receiver. Just power it with 5V and it will start sending GPS
flight controllers existing in the current world. But APM 2.8 output in serial interface
flight control systems have many sensors available such as
gyros, accelerometer, GPS, barometric pressure sensors, and
5) LITHIUM POLYMER BATTERY
list goes on. The main reason for choosing APM 2.8 is because
of its open source firmware and its programming
functionalities.APM 2.8 flight controller is the most upgraded
version of its kind. There are 2.5 and 2.6 versions too. It comes A lithium polymer battery is a rechargeable battery of the
with a build in compass for the RC drones. APM 2.8 is the ideal lithium ion technology which uses the polymer electrolyte
one for our project as it comes with built-in compass and instead of the liquid electrolyte. It has some flexible foil type
external compass via jumper. It’s a complete auto pilot system. case, so they are relatively unconstrained. The main
This has also won the prestigious Outback Challenge UAV advantages of this battery is that it can be of any desired
Competition. It allows user to turn any fixed, rotary-wing. In shape. The space and weight requirements of the mobile
addition, it turns multirotor vehicles (even cars and boats) into devices and small computer gadgets can be net easily and also

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 the space consumption and also the overall weight of the
product can be reduced in an efficient manner

F. Computational Fluid Dynamics screenshots

The computational fluid flow analysis of the design of the

drone was done and the flow simulation results tell about the
flow of air around the drone and also the pressure and velocity
features. It helps in making the drone stable by analysing the
results of the pressure and velocity feature.

Fig 9 : pressure acting on the drone

TABLE I. PRESSURE RANGE ANALYSIS

Pressure Range Analysis

S no.
Pressure From range To range
1. Very low pressure -165 pa *90 pa

2. Low pressure -90 pa 0 pa

3. Normal pressure 0 pa 50 pa

Fig 6 :CFD Ananlysis of velocity and pressure 4. High pressure 50 pa 120 pa

5. Very high pressure 120 pa 250 pa

TABLE II. VELOCITY RANGE ANALYSIS

Velocity Range Analysis

S no.
Pressure From range To range
1. Very low velocity 0 m/s 4 m/s

2. Low velocity 4 m/s 7 m/s

3. Normal velocity 7 m/s 11 m/s

4. High velocity 11 m/s 16 m/s

Fig 7 : Air flow around the drone 5. Very high velocity 16 m/s 22 m/s

IV. RESULTS & SIMULATION

Drones can be used in a lot of fields to do different kinds of
works. The design and development of the drone has helped in
the making of a efficiently flying drone which can be put to
different uses according to the need of the operator. This
particular design can also be used as a multipurpose drone
design for different applications.
The simulation results shows that the developed design has
easy manoeuvrability. The drone can move around seamlessly
through air due to the design which reduces the drag and also
the wanted movement of air through the drone surface
Fig 8 : Flow Simulation V. CONCLUSION & FUTURE WORK

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 The future work of this project is to make the drone fully
autonomous to meet the desired function as per what is needed
by the operator of the drone. By making the drone fully
autonomous the operator can access the real time date which he
wants according to the purpose to which the drone is used for.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been supported throughout by the
department of Mechatronics, in Hindustan Institute Of
Technology and Science under ANRO who has been supportive
and encouraging for all the new engineers to design and develop
new robots for the future world.
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