Primary Vehicle Construction and Design

The Primary vehicle is based on the quad rotor helicopter. It is an electrically powered vehicle and includes a deployable sub-vehicle. An electrically powered vehicle was chosen after considering various factors such as, the hazards associated with gas-powered vehicles, ease of maintenance, quietness of operation, and zero gas and thermal emission.
Fixed Pitch propellers are used and are fully ducted, to address safety concerns. The chassis of the vehicle is made of carbon fiber to lend strength to the frame for withstanding minor collisions and at the same time minimize the weight of the vehicle.

Figure 1, Primary Vehicle Chassis

The Vehicle uses high efficiency motors and electronic speed controllers, all the components, right from the electronics to the propulsion drives are powered by high density, light weight batteries.
The Primary vehicle will establish a wireless link with a base station upto a distance of 3 kms to send all it’s flight data back including suveilance pictures.

Vision is one of the most important senses for the UAV as it provides for path planning, obstacle avoidance, visual tracking and target matching. Path planning and obstacle avoidance is done by the vision module of the UAV in conjunction with other sensors like SONAR, but for target matching (Image Recognition), the UAV is solely dependent on the vision system. A lot of emphasis is given on the vision system since it is required to have high robustness and reliability.

Vision is achieved by a camera, which takes in pictures and feeds them to a vision processing software. Thus after a picture has been analyzed the vehicle can take decisions on how to maneuver and perform further processing.