Autonomous battery swapping system for quadcopter

Multicopters drain much energy from the battery because of on-board avionics system and other devices. Limited by the battery capacity, missions that require longer flight time cannot be fulfilled if there is no vehicle replacement or external logistics support. Secondly, missions such as large area surveillance and reconnaissance require a fleet (swarm) of flying vehicles working in a collaborative and persistent way, which makes maintenance support more challenging. In view of this, we have designed an automatic multicopter refuelling system - an autonomous “hot” battery swapping system which enables battery swapping for a quadcopter on the ground charging station so to minimize its down time. The system uses hot battery swapping to ensure no data loss during the swapping process. To achieve a fully autonomous flight mission, a precision landing design is also provided in this work. The design of the precise landing and autonomous refuelling will capacitate quadcopter (fleet) with flight endurance to support persistent mission requirements. This paper presents the automated battery swapping system for quadcopters which includes the design concept of the battery swapping mechanisms and the precise landing control with test results.