Design of Shape-Changing Drone Mechanism Under Various Drag and Obstacles

Drones have been developed to a greater extent in the recent years and applied in variety of applications such as e-commerce deliveries, search and rescue, traffic monitoring, weather forecasting, pesticide spraying, remote sensing and firefighting. These flying robots are subjected to more complexities and difficulties when compared to the mobile robots and underwater robots. The medium of workspace that is air and the drone has to overcome the variations of altitudes which affects the attitude. The change in altitude and turbulence difference creates rapid changes in drags and abnormal flight conditions of the drone. Controlling the drone parameters in yaw, pitch, roll and altitude is difficult in such drags and disturbances. To overcome the difficulties, a novel shape-changing drone mechanism is designed to adjust the shape and shift to feasible configurations with respect to the flight conditions. A control scheme for variable configurations of the quadcopter is framed in MATLAB/Simulink. This scheme monitors the drag conditions and automatically adjusts the configuration in quadcopter drone by the linear extension of ram of the cylinder arm and rotational adjustment of the arm. The designed mechanisms are analysed into the computational fluid dynamics analysis. Based on the condition monitoring of the fluid dynamics parameters, the ram extension and arm angles are adjusted through the drives fixed in the drone frames.