Design of Fully Automatic Drone Parachute System with Temperature Compensation Mechanism for Civilian and Military Applications

Abstract

Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (a.k.a. drones) is becoming more popular and their safety is becoming a serious concern. Due to high cost of top-end drones and requirements for secure landing, development of reliable drone recovery systems is a hot topic now. In this paper, we describe the development of a parachute system with fall detection based on accelerometer-gyroscope MPU – 6050 and fall detection algorithm based on the Kalman filter to reduce acceleration errors while drone is flying. We developed the compensation algorithm for temperature-related accelerometer errors. The parachute system tests were performed from a small height on a soft surface. Later, the system was tested under real-world conditions. The system functioned effectively, resulting in parachute activation times of less than 0.5s. We also discuss the civilian and military applications of the developed recovery system in harsh (high temperature) environment.