Autonomous Drone Charging Pad powered by helium

The need and demand for the different mode of transport especially in the difficult times like this skyrocketing day by day. We need an ecofriendly and human-friendly way of transport which can fulfil our need is a must and not an option anymore.

There are many ways of transferring the goods and emergency essentials but most take several hours or days due to various issues like traffic, government restrictions and documentations etc. If there is a novel solution like an aerial transport vehicle which can deliver these essential goods or medicines in these emergency times like pandemic we can definitely save a lot of time and lives. By using the less congest aerial routes we can arrive at the distance by following the telescopic distance or the shortest possible aerial routes.

But till now we have drones which have bigger batteries can carry significant payloads also but the problem is as the battery gets bigger it significantly contributes to the total weight of the drone and hence in order to increase the flight time or reachability putting the bigger battery is not the best solution.

So in order to overcome this, we propose a solution where all the major location in the city will have a streetlight pole equipped with an autonomous drone charging pad. These charging pads are autonomous because of the following features,

1. Precision Localisation and landing supported by April stickers and Ultra Wide Band Beacons.

2. Intelligent contact-based fast charging

3. Charger availability information relayed through LoRa on Helium network.

4. Drones will communicate to this smart chargers and get the information about the availability of the charger and it will reroute itself to nearest charger accordingly.

The reason I started this project is that, while flying my drone back in 2015 (no strict drone regulations in India at that time) the battery drained and landed on a bank! Later luckily I was able to recover the drone without any chaos. I thought if this continues in future the amazing engineering and agile robotics of quadcopter will go into the drain if the battery dies sooner than the expected. So the charging points will be necessary for the future for a sustainable drone infrastructure.

I came across LoRa and its power back in 2017 when I closely worked on LoRa based environmental sensors project at RBCCPS, IISc. Later I wrote an article on LoRa technology in the website devopedia.org

The only problem I'm facing now is the helium network is not available in India. I tried to get RAK Wireless device but it's still in customs. So I'll not be able to connect to helium network now. This will be just a demo between 2 Lora devices for the fruitful information exchange

Let's Start:

We have gathered all the required things I guess first let's build a Drone with Lora support. For now, I'll be using a standard F450 quadcopter that I built in my previous projects because building a quadcopter itself is a new adventure.

Now I will mount the LoRa Developer kit by the Helium on the drone and this will be communicating to the chargers to check the availability. This is because, in the future, the drone will sit on these streetlight based charging pads with defined identities and hence the communication is necessary to allocate the charging pad to the drone.

The basic working principle is like this

Step 1: Connecting the drone side setup:

Step 2: Connecting the charger side setup:

The basic building block of the charger side setup is the power supply and the LoRa communication module. The following data will be transmitted from the charger to the drone.

1. Location (fixed during the installation)

2. Status (Free or BUSY)

3. Battery capacity (Because the charging will be done by the energy stored in the battery with the help of solar power)

4. Nearest charger co-ordinates in case the drone is on the opposite side.

Step 3: Contact based charging :

I'm going for the contact based charging because it's fast and reliable compared to the