Persistent mobile aerial surveillance platform using intelligent battery health management and drone swapping
Alexander Williams, Oleg A. Yakimenko · 2018
Unmanned systems continue to be at the forefront of development for many industries, including homeland security and military. Unmanned systems operate with increasingly more advanced autonomy. According to the Defense Science Board report of 2012, the key aspect of enhancing autonomy is providing persistency. However, onboard fuel, in general, and battery capacity, for the electrically-powered systems in particular, limit the operational time of many systems characterized as persistent. That is why these days researchers explore a variety of solutions that have their advantages and disadvantages depending on the mission. These include using tethered systems, ground pads with contact and wireless (inductive) battery charging, solar-powered ground stations, power-line recharging stations, hydrogen fuel cells, solar-powered drones, laser-beam inflight recharging, etc. This paper focuses on the development and evaluation of simpler and seemingly more cost-efficient approach for a multi-rotor aerial persistent system enabling longer-duration missions using vehicle swapping and intelligent battery management. The developed prototype consists of three commercially available quadcopters, a wireless network router, and a laptop to execute Python code. System operation assumes autonomous operation swapping vehicles to maintain an airborne platform in the loiter area based on battery health. Based on analysis and assessment of the field test results, this paper proves the feasibility of the developed concept. For example, utilizing just four vehicle swaps the aerial surveillance platform was continuously available in the loiter area (on target) for about an hour, which is more than five times the air time of a single vehicle. While the field testing was conducted with a limited number of batteries, having nine batteries and chargers (for the particular commercial-off-the shelf system) would allow the developed system to operate for much longer durations, pretty much indefinitely.