Design and development of an automated battery swapping and charging station for Multirotor Aerial Vehicles

Multirotor Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have a problem with their persistent functioning over the years because of their less flight time compared to the charging time. This is caused by two facts. One is the large power requirement of the flight control systems, and the second is the limitations in the battery capacity. To overcome the problem of less persistent functioning of MAVs, this paper introduces a battery charging and swapping station which swaps the depleted battery of a MAV to a recharged battery while keeping the MAV in its active state to protect the mission parameters and data to operate continuously. Considering the heterogeneity of MAV designs, the designed station works in a way where the depleted battery is automatically recharged after it is swapped to the station. In this paper, design considerations, design steps and implementation process are discussed. A set of experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system and results are presented with potential future improvements.