WP3-26

Droneport: an autonomous drone battery management system

ID	WP3-26
Contributor	UWB and SM
Levels	Functional
Require	Communication service to obtain data from the assigned drones and master controller
Provide	Autonomous battery exchange and management for UAV
Input	MAVLink-based request for battery exchange UAV mission UAV battery status
Output	Available battery resources
C4D building block	Health management, Mission management
TRL	4

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Detailed Description

Droneport (DP) is a system for autonomous drone battery management. It complies with a reference architecture, dealing with drone power management, more precisely battery management. Regarding the reference architecture, the DP consists of a battery management unit for charging and storage, a robotic manipulator for automatic battery exchange, a data link to the drone, a telemetry data and human machine interface (HMI) for remote command and control. Power and storage management building blocks are implemented in Droneport, with a datalink connection to the outside world. Users can use telemetry data via MAVLink protocol to monitor the state of the DP. The DP acts autonomously, it monitors the state of the batteries, controls the battery exchange and charging providing necessary navigation information for drone landing, broadcasts the status of the remaining batteries.

Contribution and Improvement

The Droneport aims to extend the UAV missions by autonomously changing the battery of the drones.

The main goal was to develop a drone Battery management architecture fulfilling a few fundamental objectives:

• battery charging and swapping automatically
• extending the UAV operational time from minutes to hours or more
• MAVLink based data communication standards
• compact and easy handling
• reasonable purchasing/maintenance costs

The DP behaves as a standalone autonomous unit that is wirelessly interconnected with one or more UAVs. It is compatible with other C4D components. It uses an open MAVLink protocol with defined messages for communication and commands. The DP was developed as a part of Comp4Drones project from the scratch up to the technology readiness level 4 (TRL4). At the beginning of the project, there was only a notion of how to extend the operational time of UAV missions.

Design and Implementation

Figure 85: Droneport manipulator arm with a custom gripper

The Droneport development is done together with SmartMotion company. Our team collaborates together on hardware and software design. The DP will be a unique device that will be able to communicate with various UAVs. For better support of battery exchange, the DP contains a newly designed gripper and a special battery holder. Droneport hardware consists of:

• Drone landing place with ArUco based landing markers
• Uniquely designed robotic manipulator
• Uniquely designed gripper
• Battery management unit for charging and storage
• Wireless communication to the drone/swarms
• The whole device will communicate wirelessly over MAVLink protocol [29] with other devices in the network. The device is controlled using Linux based PC with REXYGEN [34] as real-time control software.

Droneport SW architecture consists of:

• Drone to DP communication protocol (defined MAVLink messages)
• Drone landing assistant - vision navigation to ArUco markers
• Battery exchange system control - manipulator controller
• Charge control - communication interface between charges and battery slots
• Battery management software
• DP software provides an open API for interoperability with various drones flight controllers.

Figure 86: Top view of the Droneport with landed drone

Simulation

see tools repository