Hexarotor Drone for Flexible Data Collection

Autonomous drones have attracted attention from both the research and industrial communities in recent years. In many research areas, customization is a key requirement as it enables creativity and innovation.

In order to tackle real-world problems, novel and targeted solutions are often needed. Open-source, easy-to-use software systems are also essential for creating and using customized algorithms and tools. While the commercial drone industry provides compact and easy-to-use solutions, they often lack customization and use closed-source software.

The ability to add different sensors, like cameras, IMUs, and even simple robotic manipulators, opens the door to several research directions that are impossible with such commercial platforms.

Fly4Future has developed a customized hexarotor drone that uses open-source software and provides the flexibility of adding new sensors as needed, depending on the application.

The hexarotor drone uses easily accessible and often 3D printed parts, making it more affordable. 3D printed parts also decrease the time needed to repair a drone in the event of a crash, which is common in field experiments.

Fly4Future’s hexarotor drone can be useful in many fields including mapping, tracking, and general data collection. With sensors like cameras and LIDARs it can serve as a platform for creation of highly accurate maps of the environment in a very short time. With added small manipulators or sampling mechanisms it can perform effective sampling of large areas of land and water. Moerover, thanks to dispensability, it can be used in mapping and monitoring within dangerous environments, like forest fires or damaged buildings.