Testing of Drone | How to check the Quality of Drone

According to the proposed plan, the outcome of this paper leads to the development of a quadcopter that has a stable flight. This project is implemented using Raspberry-pi, a frame where everything is mounted, motors, and propellers for the movement of the quadcopter, ESC to control the motors. The result is a very stable flight platform. Longer flight time can be achieved by adjusting the trade-off between two variables, the battery capacity (weight) the efficiency of the thrust developed by the motors. The efficiency of the thrust has two factors which are the efficiency of the motor itself and therefore the propeller design.

To safely fly the quadcopter; various tests were administered on the individual components and therefore the quadcopter at the entire to make sure everything is functioning properly before being flown. Two test stages were carried out on the quadcopter; these tests were Unit tests and Flight tests.

Table of Contents

Unit Tests

While the basic flight control of the APM 2.6 was tested simply by PID (proportional-integral-derivative) tuning and flying the quadcopter; several sensors needed to be tested since they were used for the tracking algorithms. The barometer and compass on-board the flight controllers were unit tested to ensure optimal performance. These tests and are discussed below.

Battery test

Battery test we had access to several different battery sizes from which they could perform battery life tests. The prototype; including the Flight time and camera accessories; had a mean current draw of 23.95A. With the largest 5100 mAh battery; the quadcopter was able to meet the requirements for flight time. Figure 4 shows the results including the production battery.

Motor test

Motor test the motors were tested to lift the quadcopter and its components successfully (1.3kg). Above that; the motors were able to lift an additional 0.9 kg. The prototype was able to fly over 15 km/hr. meeting the prototype requirement, but the utmost speed wasn’t tested out of concern for a crash that would occur during this test.

Pre-flight test

The speed controller and motor were connected to the battery. Then the speed controller was switched on. The speed controller controlled the speed of the fan according to reassigned conditions on the IMU sensors. The speed of the fan increased as the surrounding air pressure increased and it decreased as the air pressure decreased. Increment of both air pressure and speed can be changed according to user preferences by the modification in programming. So the speed controller performed as per the planning.

Post-flight test

The next test was actual flight time with loads starting from 0 grams to 480 grams. AA batteries were used because of the load; the batteries weigh 24 grams each and are easy to connect over the whole vehicle to distribute the load. The tests were conducted in both the tethered and untethered modes. The results of the constrained test are shown in Table 9. These results were verified by flying the quadcopter unconstrained with a weight of 96 grams and 480 grams to see performance differences at the 2 extremes and to work out the effects of the quadcopter being constrained during testing. During the test, the quadcopter was flown at approximately five feet off the bottom and therefore the control panel was set to stabilize flight.