An Autonomous Drone with Robotic End Effector for Maintenance Operation of 5G Mobile Towers

5G is the next wave in the communication industry where the end customers enjoy multiple services with minimum latency. Since 5G towers operate in high-frequency spectrum the coverage of these towers is very limited when compared with its earlier versions and this facilitates the requirement of installing additional number of mobile towers. One of the key requirements for enabling the full-scale deployment of the new towers in addition to the existing mobile towers are to ensure their regular inspection and maintenance without human intervention. While there has been research carried out to develop autonomous drones for monitoring mobile towers, the development is limited to the inspection stage and not capable of fixing the faults without human assistance. The fundamental limitation that prevented carrying out a repairing task was the absence of a competent robotic arm that can act as a human arm. Traditional drones are only equipped with a robotic manipulator on the bottom using which cannot access all the points in a typical wireless infrastructure with a positive slope. This paper designs an autonomous drone, from scratch, with a robotic arm on the top to inspect and repair faults in mobile towers. The main contribution is a novel coupling algorithm that takes proactive action to stabilize the drone while the arm is carrying out the mending tasks with less energy. The drone is also tested in a real- time windy environment by emulating the mobile tower scenario.