Downside Up:Rethinking Parcel Position for Aerial Delivery
The conventional approach to parcel placement in most delivery drone designs today is to place the parcel centrally beneath the drone's rotor plane. However, if the parcel is too large, this will result in an obstruction of the propeller slipstream, incurring significant drag. As such, the parcel's location below the rotor plane limits the size of parcels that can be delivered, specifically super-sized parcels that protrude beyond the bounds of the four rotors. Delivering these large parcels requires bigger drone platforms, which consequently consume more energy, necessitate large storage spaces, and are less portable. In this letter, we propose an alternative approach, placing the parcel above the rotor plane. However, placing a parcel above a quadcopter encounters two main challenges. The first is the optimal position of the CG to maintain stability of the drone. Second is the aerodynamic influence on the lift of the drone with a parcel is placed above the propellers. To address these challenges, aerodynamic characterization experiments were performed and a new drone design was proposed. This letter presents a prototype quadcopter design solution that places the parcel above the propellers to enable delivery of super-sized parcels, as well as a compact rotor design configuration for lower storage cost and increased portability. The new approach of placing an over-sized parcel above propellers provides the 82% increase in thrust over putting the parcel below the propellers.
Downside Up_RA_L_PMKornatowski_paper.pdf
Preprint
openaccess
CC BY
2.02 MB
Adobe PDF
f095ceacf120eed26265ff78b1838f6e
Downside Up_RA_L_PMKornatowski_video.mp4
Publisher's version
restricted
CC BY
27.3 MB
Video MP4
75f2edf37743d479fb7d0e25c978eb18