Research and development on perching aircraft

Nowadays UAVs and MAVs are playing more and more important roles in both civil and military applications. Their variation in sizes and specific designed functions provide great flexibility in deployment. There are already plenty types of mature UAVs are developed in which surveillance UAVs take up a great part and the family is still expanding with improved capabilities. However, the greatest shortfall in such UAVs has been repeatedly identified as insufficient flight persistence or “hang time”. Many researches and developments have been done on this area and two tackling methods are proposed. Either the engine performance shall be improved continuously or a temporary stopover for UAVs at interesting places can be achieved. (Labs and Corporation 2012) The second method is more promising and feasible as it is not constrained by technological limitations and requires less fuel and care from the operators which makes it environmental friendly and economic. Besides, stationary surveillance will lower the possibility of UAVs to be detected, which is very crucial for military users. This final year project follows the second proposal by researching and developing perching mechanism for two types of UAVs, unpowered gliders and powered quadrotors so that they can perch on certain targets, e.g. tree branches and poles and power off engines while conduct missions and eventually return back to bases. The team consists of three FYP students and one doctoral student. It is a continuous working from previous year and plenty of research, development and tests are done with work distributed. The three sub-working area are assigned to three FYP students, i.e. Mr Lee Wei Chong takes charge of design, Mr Tan Chun Yong focus on testing and the author does major work on development. Comprehensive studies and try are done to develop the real scale and flyable ready prototypes to grasp tubes with diameter ranging from 3cm to 10 cm. (Smiley, Greco et al. 2000) Two prototypes are eventually built to be tested for glider and quadrotor correspondingly. Inspirations are drawn from birds’ claws structures and working principles. The prototype for quadrotors resembles birds’ claws with three digits driven by a servo motor to open and close accordingly. Then the mechanism is tested in a comprehensive environment to capture its motion for validation and analysis. The result shows that the mechanism is working well with reliable ability and consistency to grasp desired targets in various conditions. The test is further analysed with acquisition of data for further improvement. It is noted that some areas and improvements are still to be worked on in the next phase of the project.Bachelor of Engineering (Aerospace Engineering