Design and testing of an adaptive remote-controlled hexacopter

As the technology for multi-rotor SUAS grows at a greater and greater rate every day, their importance in the scientific world has exponentially grown. Multi-rotor SUAS have the unique ability of being able to carry out a wide array of missions with scientific payloads that were previously not possible to do. However most modern SUAS multi-rotor vehicles are not designed with carrying scientific payloads in mind. Many commercial multirotor SUAS are designed to carry cameras and their respective gimbals which are small. light, and compact. The designs of these multirotors can make it hard to integrate scientific payloads which tend to be bulkier and have more integration requirements than a camera and gimbal setup. This led to the creation of a unique vehicle solution that serves as a test bed for payload and novel SUAS based applications. This set of broad and unknown requirements creates a unique design challenge for optimization of size weight and power to create a vehicle with minimum impacts on final mission. To account for these needs, the aircraft was designed to allow for large payloads both in size and weight, with ease of integration and modularity being key factors in the design decisions as well. To explore the use of a purpose built scientific and engineering research vehicle, the Adaptive Remote-Controlled Hexacopter for Engineering Research (ARCHER) was designed and built. Following its construction, ARCHER went through a series of test flights to tune the aircraft, gather data on its flight capabilities and certify that the vehicle was ready for payload testing. For payload testing flights, ARCHER and the Skateboard (an older research vehicle) were flown together to compare the performance of the vehicles with atmospheric sensor payloads attached. ARCHER was found to have a shorter flight time than the Skateboard by 7 minutes but has greater stability in higher winds. ARCHER was also successfully able to integrate an ultrasonic anemometer to take wind measurements with no modifications to the base vehicle. ARCHER completed 4 mesonet comparison flights with this payload, with the data gathered being similar to previous vehicles.