GDUT UAV

Hexacopter

One of the earliest UAV developed by GDUT is a hexacopter, which is a multirotor first made its public debut in 2013 when it won the first place in 2013 Challenger Cup competition, and it is designed by a team of five led by Mr. Ke Zong-Ze (柯宗泽). The other team members include Liu Bai-Fang (刘柏芳), Zou Zhi-Ming (邹志明), Li Xin-Yin (李欣怡) and Li Wang-Long (李宛隆), who wrote all the computer program codes for the UAV. Three professors have also provided guidance, and they are Professors Su Cheng-Yue (苏成悦), Chen Yuan-Dian (陈元电), and Lan Rui-Bin (蓝锐彬). This unmanned hexacopter has a pair of skids as landing gear, and the complete name is Fully Automatically Piloted Multirotor UAV Intelligent Flight Control System (Quan-Zi-Dong Jia-Shi Duo-Xuan-Yi Wu-Ren-Ji Flight Control System, 全自动驾驶无人机智能飞控系统).

This hexacopter has a pair of skids as landing gear. The hexacopter has some basic obstacle detection system as standard equipment, thus it can automatically avoid obstacle, so that if erroneous command is given in remote control operations that would direct the UAV into obstacles, the UAV itself would override the erroneous command and avoid the obstacles and crash. The hexacopter utilizes GPS navigation, and the flight can be preprogrammed. Another design feature of this UAV system is that it incorporates battery recharger stations in an attempt to solve the problem of short endurance caused by the battery. To increase endurance by increasing batteries would reduce payload, so battery recharge stations are set up and when battery is low during flight, the UAV would automatically select and go to the closest recharge station based GPS coordinates pre-stored in the onboard computer on the principle similar to GPS navigation system for cars, and recharged, the UAV would continue to perform its mission.