Modification of a Toy Helicopter into a Highly Cost Effective Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Electrotechnology, grade: A, Army Public College of Management & Sciences (UET Taxila), course: Electronics , language: English, abstract: Following are the components and systems we added in our This is one of our main achievements. Normally these toy design. A carbon fibre rod and specially designed small mechanical helicopters are designed to carry only their own weight. To make the helicopter capable of carrying the extra load of added modules; we parts to incorporate several modules on the helicopter's body, Special increased the operating battery voltages from 7.8V to 11.1V, 1.8A. heat sinks for motors of the main rotors, IR Range Finders that serve The motors have a maximum rating of 14V and we are operating in a as the basic sensing units, BLDC Motors to implement the Wrong Command Rejection and Optimization (WCRO) Algorithm, An AVR safe range. To achieve this task we had to go through a series of based Isolated modular System that serves as the main controlling experiments with various Power MOSFETs incorporated in place of unit, Payload capability enhancing module, Wireless video camera. original FETs i.e. D150 used in the starting model. One important problem we encountered was that the motors The problem we encountered in achieving this feature was that there was not enough voltage for the gate drive available at the started to get heated up after sometime during the flight. We receiver circuit's original FETs. To overcome this problem we incorporated our specially designed heat sinks inside the body to overcome this problem. We identified the empty spaces inside the conducted a complete study of the receiver circuit, did reverse helicopter's body near the main motors and placed the heat sinks engineering on it and extracted signals at different points as shown in there, so that they connect with the body and whole body becomes a Fig. 2. A total of 200mW power is being consumed by the transmitter heat sink; effectively increasing the heat dissipation. module and is working on the principle of PPM (Pulse Position The desired final result was to ensure safe flights and crash Modulation). There are two power ports for the two motors of the avoidance. To achieve this purpose we decided to use IR Range main rotors being powered through the JFETs as numbered. Then Finders and BLDC motors. The challenge was to place them on the there is a small port for the tail rotor. The receiver-transmitter radio helicopter's body so that they monitor a good effective area around set operates at a frequency of 40 MHz. A piezoelectric gyroscope is the helicopter.