Design and implementation of control of perching mechanism

• Main Author: Quek, Jian Xing.
• Other Authors: Low Kin Huat
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/54184
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are aerial vehicles that operate without the need of any human pilot on board. As its popularity to be used in military and civilian domains for various applications are increasing these days, people would prefer a UAV that has a long lasting battery life, thus the need to increase the UAV operation life by different approach. This report shows the design and implementation of servo motor control for the perching mechanism so as to allow the UAV to perch on objects such as tree branches to conserve power usage. The project prototype was done by two people, one on design and development of the mechanism, and other on developing the sensors and programs to integrate the mechanism and UAV. As the initial idea for the project was to use two independent controller boards to control the UAV and perching mechanism, the author spent time to build and configure a controller board from scratch by using the PIC18F4520 MCU. The author managed to setup the oscillator, analog digital convertor and PWM generation modules for the perching mechanism use before the idea was then changed to use only the UAV controller board (STM32F4) due to space and weight constrain. The resulting prototype was able to perform perching on 8cm diameter branch and tube. However, more time is needed to reconfigure the analog digital convertor module of the STM32F4 controller board in-order for the perching mechanism to perform better perching on irregular shape.