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Our lab is currently working on multi-agent search algorithms with multiple drones and needed a way to precisely land each drone on a wireless charging pad. The drone's control algorithms was insufficient to guarantee that the drone would on the center of the wireless charger, so a physical solution was needed. I designed a custom 3D-printed landing pad in SolidWorks that uses a cone-shaped funnel to guide the drone to the center every time.
From an initial design, the drone was sitting too high above the inductive coil contained inside the wireless charger. On the next revision of the landing pad, I disassembled the wireless charger to design the a 3D printed pad around the internal PCB and coil. I also adjusted the slope angle of the conical shape to guarantee that the drone will slide to the center.
The conical shape of the funnel allows the drone to slide towards the target position after dropping on the pad. The landing legs of the drop then slot into the circular-shaped channel to lock it into perfect charging location. This design allows for the drone to even drop from a short height over the pad and still reach the target location consistently. Multiple landing pads were fabricated for our lab's drone experiments.
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