Drone Station

The drone station is divided in 3 sections, analogous to a tree:

Drones enter the landing bay to exchange payloads and/or batteries. The upper area also serves as a secure, weatherproof storage location for the drone between deliveries. The landing bay is sealed from the rest of the station by a gasketed door through which payloads and batteries pass.

The middle area houses a 5-DOF robotic arm that performs material handling tasks. Batteries are stored in charging docks in the upper area. Payloads are passed between the drone and a user-interface tray.

The lower area contains electronics for computing and power delivery, and a door used for maintenance access.

The landing bay is enclosed by a domed hatch that opens in four quadrants.

The hatch design was guided by several motivations:

• All hardware resides within the landing bay, to prevent water ingress into lower sections

• The hatch quadrants open wide for easy drone landing

• When opened fully, a 2m-tall user has ample head clearance

• The hatch's motion profile compresses gaskets around the full perimeter of each quadrant

I started by considering a simple hinge, but quickly realized I would be unable to satisfy all of the requirements.

So, I designed a four-bar linkage by iterating on parametric sketches in Solidworks. The links nearly form a parallelogram, but slightly askew, which moves the hatch quadrants in a hybrid motion of translation near fully closed (to compress sealing gaskets) and rotation near fully open (to achieve a wide opening angle).

As a bonus, the station's industrial designer was pleased with the dynamic, elegant motion - "like a flower opening up."

Each quadrant is mounted to a pair of these linkages. I chose to power each hatch quadrant with a gearmotor controlled with feedback from an absolute rotary encoder mounted to the output shaft.