Utvärdering av bromskraft hos räddningsdrönare med mål att vertikallanda

Abstract

This project is provided by the Swedish Sea Rescue Society (SSRS) and focuses on investigating the possibilities for their current sea rescue drone to extract reverse thrust from its current components with the goal of achieving a vertical landing. During recent years the SSRS has hired several groups and universities in order to develop their ongoing drone project. The goal with their drones is to fly them out to incident areas at sea in order to record, broadcast and collect information of the situation in order to then forward it to the sea rescue personnel so that they can be better prepared for the incident at hand before they arrive. Under current conditions the drone is expected to fly out to the incident area, circulate the area until it is let go to drift away until it naturally lands somewhere at sea where it is later collected. The current version of the drone is entirely optimized around maximized glide-functionality and is thereby very light with only a singular propeller mounted in the back of the drone. This means that the distance the drone travels before it naturally lands in water can be quite far away which means it can both be difficult to find and to collect. Therefore it would be much more convenient if the drone could instead be vertically landed onto one of the sea rescue vehicles instead. The investigations and wind tunnel tests that have been done in this project shows that the current combination of components in the drone do not allow for enough reverse thrust to be able to vertically land the drone safely. For the drone to be able to carry its own weight under static circumstances the drone would need to reach a reverse thrust equal to roughly 10 newton while the maximum achievable reverse thrust reached in this project only reached upwards of 7 newton. These 7 newton were also achieved under unusually high electrical currents for the drone. The project evaluates many different cases and flight situations relative electrical currents and presents the resulting data as well as discusses potential solutions and further potential projects which could possibly lead to the eventual goal of vertically landing the drone.