Design, Dynamics, Development and Deployment of Hexacopter for Agricultural Applications
S. Senthilkumar, G Anushree, J. Darshan Kumar, R. Vijayanandh, R Raffik, K. Kesavan, S. Indira Prasanth
Abstract
The current success in Unmanned Aircraft System [UAS] technology made its way to become the solution of each and every real-life problem. Agriculture is backbone of world so the researchers have been working on the implementation of advanced techniques on it in order to achieve high productivity with good quality. Through manual pesticide spraying approach, more than thirty lakhs humans are being affected severely, especially humans’ nervous system may chance to distress lot than other physical disorder issues. Thus, an advanced cum automated system based spraying is mandatory in agricultural field to enhance the lifespan of both humans and crops. In this investigation, a remote-controlled UAV based advanced approach is used to spray the pesticide as well as fertilizer to avoid the human direct contact. An UAV is operated by human pilot or autonomous path will be used to spray pesticides. The vertical takeoff and landing based Hexacopter is used to spray the low volume pesticide over a small area. Total payload liftoff weight of Hexacopter is calculated as 6 kg and thereafter the design phase is executed. This paper describes the conceptual design based development of Low cost Hexacopter for spraying purpose, which can be feasible for farmers. Additionally, it discusses the integration of sprayer and tank for this proposed Unmanned Multi Rotor Unmanned Aircraft system. The sprayer used to spray the liquid as well as solid contents, which are done by Flat fan nozzle. The entire setup is modeled in CATIA and computationally analyzed in ANSYS Workbench. The altitude based control dynamics and motor dynamics are executed in MATLAB and thereby the suitable electronic components are finalized. Finally, the suitable UAS is optimized and constructed for real-time implementation.