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Microgravity Enabling Multirotors

Compact Like Drop Towers and Programmable Like Parabolic Flights

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Abstract

This work establishes multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as viable microgravity platforms. Towards this, a vertical microgravity enabling maneuver suitable for multirotors, control and automation strategies, and techniques to enhance the performance of multirotors as microgravity platforms are proposed. Successful microgravity enabling maneuvers are performed to show the proposed control and automation strategies’ effectiveness using two multirotor test vehicles. Further, this paper shows that all the existing multirotors can be microgravity platforms and provide a method to calculate the maximum microgravity duration a multirotor can provide. Finally, experiments are conducted onboard one of the multirotors executing a microgravity enabling maneuver to observe the effect of microgravity on liquid level in a capillary and liquid meniscus shape in a glass cuvette. These experiments and the microgravity enabling flight tests demonstrate that multirotors can be turned into microgravity platforms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the two UAVs presented in this paper are the first multirotor UAVs to achieve microgravity and the first UAVs—fixed-wing or rotary—to conduct onboard experiments in microgravity.

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Notes

  1. The definitions of fwof the microgravity platform’s performance measures such as g-time, g-level, g-quality, and g-jitters are provided in Appendix-A.

  2. Lower the g-level, better the performance of a microgravity platform.

  3. Note that these variables can belong to more than one class, or they may belong to none.

  4. The quadrotor’s block diagram is not explicitly provided, as the only difference in the quadrotor compared to the hexrotor is the absence of inverted propulsion units.

  5. This automation strategy also consists of a safety mechanism to shut down all the rotors, which will trigger in case of a communication loss or loss of stability to avoid any potential hazard during an uncontrolled flight.

  6. For an in-depth detail of this acceleration control law, readers may refer to our previous article (Kedarisetty and Manathara 2019).

  7. The experienced acceleration by the multirotor is calculated as \(g_z = a_z + g,g_y = a_y, g_x = a_x\).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Mr. Ajo Joseph, the multirotor pilot, for his time and patience. I also thank Prof. Amit Kumar and Prof. A. Sameen of Indian Institute of Technology Madras for allowing me to use their laboratories to conduct experiments. I am grateful for the lab members who helped me to set up experiments. Finally, I thank Dr. Joel George Manathara of Indian Institute of Technology Madras for his suggestions on the work presented in this paper.

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  1. Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras, Chennai, India

    Kedarisetty Siddhardha

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  1. Kedarisetty Siddhardha
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Appendix - A

Appendix - A

The performance of a microgravity platform is quantified using the following measures.

  1. a)

    g-time: It is the duration for which the microgravity platform can experience microgravity.

  2. b)

    g-level: It is the mean acceleration experienced by the microgravity platform during the g-time

  3. c)

    g-quality: It is the root mean square deviation of the experienced acceleration about the g-level value

  4. d)

    g-jitters: It is the amplitude and frequency of the acceleration experienced by the microgravity platform during the g-time. Unlike the other microgravity performance measures, g-jitters is a graphical measure that provides the amplitude of the acceleration experienced by the microgravity platform at different frequencies.

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Siddhardha, K. Microgravity Enabling Multirotors. Microgravity Sci. Technol. 33, 36 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12217-021-09889-1

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