Diseño u construcción de un prototipo de sistema de vuelo cooperativo de vehículos aéreos no tripulados para tareas de microfumigación.

Abstract

The present investigation shows that a prototype cooperative flight system was designed and built for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) focused on microfumigation applications. It is made up of the initial and terminal (UAVs), which comply with the requirements. Making cooperative flight possible, a drone radio communication to another drone. A modular part of the research was to make the retransmission of communication viable, carried out by commercial telemetry modules for the exchange of information between aircraft. Time division multiplexing (TDM) and frequency hopping expanded spectrum (FHSS) techniques were used, so that the presence of several telemetries did not produce radio frequency interference. For the autonomous control of the mission relay and ground, a set of programs written in C ++ was developed, in addition to a user interface made in C # for sending commands and monitoring data and flight status. Fifteen flight tests were conducted in auto mode, the ground control station was able to handle only one (UAVs) at a time and distance traveled on average was 665.4 meters. With the prototype cooperative flight system, it was executed the same number of trials, but with the ability to use two (UAVs) the average distance traveled amounted to 1349.33 meters. A statistically significant difference was found in the distance traveled from the tests when the Student t-test was carried out, so it is concluded that the prototype is capable of covering more ground in the same time, making it very optimal. It is recommended to centralize the exchange of information in a technological platform for multi-UAV control.