Environment surveillance for threat detection with Spybot

SpyBot Aim

With the development of technology, more and more importance is given to unmanned ground vehicles. These types of vehicles are helping to investigate remote and hard-to-reach locations giving humans additional resources to get more data from the surroundings. The unmanned ground vehicle depicted here is called SpyBot, is used for the purposes of quick analysis of the terrain with the simultaneous creation of a mini-map. All these are placed in one neatly designed application that is used to control the drone and see the output of the camera and mini-map.

Team Up

As me and my friends were senior year students in technical field, we were required to research, design and create our own Senior Design Project for our Diploma Defense. So we decided to create our own real life drone from our favorite game, R6S drone in real life.

About the Drone

This type of drones are already crafted and still used by many US and other militaries. What makes our drone special was that, with the movable tail not only it was easy to observe surrounding but also it helped the drone to move fast while keeping its balance. Beside, with the help of lidar sensor, magnetometer and GPS, we could calculate the GPS coordinates of the object around it with the max distance of 15M (in best condition).

Chanllenges

It was hard to design such a drone since you have balance it or else it would be alcoholic drone which can't move in straight line. Also tail of the drone should be heavy so that it wouldn't flip when we wanted to drive it. We didn't have too much place on the drone to add batteries, so we added the batteries to tail which also helped us for the weight balance. We wanted to design the drone small as much as we could but since the parts we bought were too big, we couldn't create small body for it.

Design

Our first design was too messy and too much wires going around. Also we were using 3x18650 Li-Ion batteries, which were too heavy and big for our drone. Later we switched to the smaller version, 3xCR123a batteries. Also this time batteries were all swappable if it is needed after long term use.

Crafting

With the 3 series Li-ion batteries, we got output approximately 12.5V which was converted to 5V with the voltage regulator for the Arduino and the sensors. The camera module which connected to our video/audio transmitter and motor driver with the motors were directly connected to the batteries' output (12.5V) since the motors were using 12V and transmitter had its own regulator for the camera and itself was operating in the voltage range of 7V-15V.

For the body, first I wanted to use 3D print but later just used 2 sushi chopsticks for the main body and tail which were more durable and kind of elastic.

Video and Audio transmission was separate from main system. It was automatically sending video and audio after turning on the drone. However, in order to control and give commands to drone, we used Bluetooth module which was paired with the controller's computer's Bluetooth.

I used hot glue to place all the components on the body, but screw placement or using other type of glues would be much better, since the transmitter, camera, batteries, motors and motor drivers, almost everything gets really hot overtime, which melts the glue.

The drone also have to be able to operate if it was placed upside down, so electronics and antenna have to be inside the radius of the wheels. On our new design we placed our microcontrollers and sensors on PCB and made it to look neat.

With the new design, our antenna also stands straight up which increases range of video/audio transmission. In the case of upside-down position, it was possible to turn it back to correct position with some maneuvers.

Video/Audio was receive in the main PC where we also controlling our drone with the Bluetooth. With the distance, drone orientation (magnetometer(compass)) and GPS coordinates of the drone, we were able to find the other object's GPS coordinates.

The main design of the drone changed after we were accepted as a representative of our university in the competition/exhibition called Teknofest.