Dynamic Flight Tracking: Designing System for Multirotor UAVs With Pixhawk Autopilot Data Verification

Abstract

The increasing diversity of multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) designs poses significant challenges in evaluating their flight characteristics and performance parameters. This is particularly true for commercially available UAVs whose control units do not provide users with data that could be used, for example, to estimate the operational and flight limits of the flight device itself. This study introduces the concept of a mountable device designed to track and assess the flight parameters of quadcopters, independent of the UAV’s systems. Specifically, it involves independent monitoring of rotations, flight speed, air pressure, temperature, and drone orientation in space. The device validation involved real flight tests with the IRIS+ quadcopter using the Pixhawk control system, whose data were taken as a benchmark for validation. To demonstrate the applicability and benefits of such a device, the study also created a concept of an operational envelope for the drone, i.e. dependence of thrust on weight, angle of attack and speed. This concept was created using robotic simulation in the Gazebo environment. In the simulations, the IRIS+ device was used to simulate flights with different payload weights (0.9–2.9 lb, approximately 0.4–1.3 kg) and twenty flight speeds (1–20 ms−1), while simultaneously monitoring the angle of attack and motor revolutions (subsequently converted to thrust). The created operational envelope was subsequently validated using data from real flights. The overall results demonstrated the successful validation of the designed device and the accuracy of the measurement of critical flight parameters, with rotation measurement errors ranging between 100–200 RPM, angle of attack error at 4.25°, and altitude measurement error based on pressure at 0.56 m. Additionally, within this concept, the measurement of indicated airspeed was introduced, reflecting the expected flight speed values. In the context of validating the operational envelope, the results showed that the parameters of real flights fell within the predicted area of the created operational envelope for the IRIS+ drone. Independent monitoring devices like this can benefit operational limit determination and other testing purposes, especially for UAVs lacking data-sharing control units.

Keywords

• Aviation
• flight tracking
• quadrocopter
• quadrocopter flight characteristics
• robotic simulation
• unmanned aerial vehicle