ORNITHOPTER WITH LIVE VIDEO

RECEPTION FOR MILITARY SURVEILLANCE

Chandana Sooji1, Vijayashri Horadi2
1,2 5th SEM Students in Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, KLE.I.T, Huballi, Karnataka, India.

[email protected]

[email protected]

Abstract-
In recent years flying by propelled wings, also called as
Ornithopter, has been an area of interest because of its
application to Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). In the field of
Defence and during the war of Iraq, a need for live surveillance
within a close distance was felt, which lead to research of various
techniques for live surveillance in the battle ground to provide
the necessary intelligence to the troops in the line of action. These
miniature vehicles seek to mimic small birds to achieve never
before seen agility in flight. In order to better study the control of
flapping wing flight we have researched and modelled a large
scale ornithopter called the Garuda. The Garuda is capable of
carrying a microcontroller, sensor package and an on board
surveillance camera to transmit live video feed to the receiver in Fig 1: An ornithopter called the Smart Bird developed by
real time. The design takes special care to optimize payload Festo, a German company specialising in the field of Automation
capacity, crash survivability, and field repair abilities. This and Bionics.
model has applications in the field of defence spy surveillance
over enemy territories without being detected or arousing
suspicion.
2. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
Keywords: Ornithopter, Military, Surveillance, Autonomous,
2.1 Microcontroller
Video

1. INTRODUCTION

Natural fliers like birds and insects have captivated the minds
of human inventors through history. The ease and grace with
which they take to the air vastly surpasses the state of the artin
aircraft and their control systems. This is not to say that
modern aircraft designs are ineffective, they are excellent in
many respects. Propellers and turbines are very efficient Fig 2: An Arduino Mega Development Board used as the
methods of producing thrust and air foils efficiently produce microcontroller for the Ornithopter Project.
lift. A Boeing 747 achieves a dimensionless cost of
transport(energy used divided by weight times distance) of The selection of the microcontroller to base the rest of the
0.1, equivalent to a soaring albatross, and does it with system on is one of the most defining decisions of the design
amazing reliability, but it will never match the process because it makes up the largest amount of additional
manoeuvrability of the albatross. Interest in the design and payload weight. Because the scaling of the robot depends on
control of ornithopters has grown in recent years as interest the payload capacity needed the computer choice will have a
has grown in the area of Micro Aerial Vehicles or MAVs. long chain of effects down the design process. The Arduino
These small flying machineshave struck the imaginations of based controller has been used because of its versatility and
many as ideal platforms for a variety of tasks including user friendly control system development.The single board
systems monitoring and surveillance where a swarm of tiny Arduino Mega has on board analog to digital converter,
agents would be unobtrusive and have better access to several I/O boards to interface with servos and wireless
confined areas than larger flying vehicles. communication.The controller itself weighs around 100gms
but with servos and wireless module the weight increases to
roughly 400g. The Arduino itself is an open source hardware
which has a large range of use and is much more compact and
lightweight. The software development environment has a
steep learning curve and all of the software is to be written in Direction we are able to estimate the orientation of the
C. Ornithopter in space and hence manoeuvre it in the requisite
2.2 Battery manner.

2.5 Data Logging Micro SD Card

Arrangement put to use to record and store all sensor and
flight data of the Balloon Sat from launch to recovery. The
recovered data is thus used to support theoretical experiments
and help infer results as well as plot useful information
graphs.

2.6 Battery Level Monitor

A voltage divider is created and thus the Battery levels on
Fig 3: An 11.1 V, 1550mAh Lithium Polymer high discharge board are mapped and data is stored for further studies on
battery consumption and the Ornithopter flight time.

The battery used is a three cell lithium polymer pack, the 2.7 Ls20031 GPS 5HZ Receiver
standard for high performance machines like airplanes on this The LS20031 GPS receiver is a complete GPS smart antenna
scale because it has the best power and energy to weight ratios receiver that includes an embedded antenna and GPS receiver
available. Power density is the main concern at the initial circuits. This low-cost unit outputs an astounding amount of
stages of the project because flights aren't expected to last for position information 5 times a second. The receiver is based
long which would make power output the limiting factor for on the proven technology found in LOCOSYS 66 channel
the battery. A lithium polymer battery can be discharged at up GPS SMD type receivers that use MediaTek chip solution.
to 10 times its capacity (commonly referred to as 10C) with
specially selected batteries capable of continuous discharge up 3. HARDWARE INTERFACE
to 25C which makes it able to deliver the short bursts of
power that the ornithopter needs to flap during short test
flights.

Lithium phosphate batteries produced by A123 were also

investigated because they have similar characteristics but the
cell sizes available are too large to make a suitably lightweight
pack at the correct voltage. The cell price of the lithium
phosphate batteries works out to a pack at about half the price
of the lithium polymer pack. In addition to this the lithium Fig 5: A CC2500 Serial Transceiver Module with SPI
phosphate cells are much less sensitive to overcharging which Interface as shown. Courtesy: iLabs
causes lithium polymer batteries to violently explode. Because
of potential cost and safety advantages of the lithium Conventional hobby servos like those used on model aircraft
phosphate cells over the lithium polymer cells they may be use a pulse width modulated signal with a period of about
further investigated in the future. As the current drawn from 40hz and a pulse width of between 1 and 2 milliseconds which
the motor wasn't yet known a standard battery, 1200mAh at corresponds to the desired absolute position of the servo's
11.4V and 93 grams, is chosen for the weight calculation. output drive. Because the computer system's main interface is
over RS232 serial, a conversion system is needed. For the
2.3 Sensors network communication, a CC2500 serial transceiver is used
which has an RS232 interface. The CC2500 transceiver could
also be connected to the Arduino microcontroller using an
Arduino shield or else be coupled with an SPI Interface. The
drive motor controller sits between the serial to PWM servo
controller and the motor and uses that signal to control a high
current driver suitable for the power requirements of the large
motor. This is again a standard radio control airplane part and
a JETI Model Advance 30 brushless motor speed controller
was chosen for this application because of its past use in the
Fig 4: An MPU-9150 9 Axis Inertial Mass Unit module with lab. The speed controller is designed to handle 30 amps of
Analog Output. Courtesy: Spark fun Electronics current which was considered to be an upper bound of power
required, about 300 watts at the 11.4 volts the battery pack
2.4MPU 9150 runs at.
A 9 Axis Inertial Mass Unit to know the exact orientation of
the Ornithopter at any instance and to also quantitatively
measure all physical forces acting on the payload The IMU
package consists of a 3 Axis Accelerometer, a 3 Axis
Gyroscope, a Digital Motion Processor and a 3 Axis Digital
Compass. Using these values of Acceleration, Force and
 The motor used in the flapping mechanism of the Ornithopter
is a Brushless DC Motor with 5000 RPM. A gear reduction
ratio of 24:1 is to be used, giving a shaft speed of roughly 210
RPM.

Figure 6: Main drive motor speed controller.

Converts the PWM control signal into the appropriate

waveform to drive the high current brushless motor.

Figure 9: Side view of the complete gearbox showing the motor

mounted and the configuration of the transmission gears.

5. TAIL ANDWING
The tail section of the ornithopter is responsible for both of
the controllable degrees of freedom aside from the ability to
throttle the drive motor. The tail of the Garuda is set up with
one servo directly connected to the tail at an angle and another
further up the body which rocks it via a linkage. Mounting the
rudder servo at an angle is important because with a single
control surface the elevator and rudder are naturally coupled,
moving the rudder servo makes the tail also move in the
vertical direction unless it's at zero angle where it doesn't have
any control authority anyway.

Fig 7: Block diagram of the overall electronics system

configuration.

4.MOTORS AND GEAR RATIO

Figure 10: The tail section of the Kestrel. The tail uses a clever
configuration to decouple the elevator and rudder actions

With the tail at an angle to the rudder servo it allows the servo
to be held into the zero angle position with respect to the
ornithopter body and while the tail stays near the trimmed
position for horizontal light. This causes the tail to move in a
bowl shaped trajectory decoupled from the elevator action and
is much easier to control by a human pilot. It does not solve
the problem when the elevator servo moves the tail out of the
trimmed horizontal position, but being able to exploit that is a
big advantage where it applies. The wings have a triangular
Figure 8: A BLDC Motor support structure made from carbon rods. A main spar runs
along the leading edge of the wing and a strut connects from
the rear of the ornithopters body to a point near the tip of the
main spar. From this strut there are several smaller carbon
rods that project to the edge of the wing which are somewhat
free to move. This results in a fanning motion from the trailing
edge of the wing that produces thrust while the leading edge is
aping up and down which directly contributes a part of the lift
in addition to the conventional lift coming from airflow over
the wing.

Figure 12: An image showing the space frame structure with the
motor and gear assembly of Kestrel, an ornithopter whose
design is similar to Garuda.

7. LIVE VIDEO RECEPTION

A micro camera compatible with the controller has been
mounted the ornithopter to provide live surveillance. The live
feedback from the ornithopter will be obtained off board on an
LCD display. The surveillance system has a transmitter that
will transmit the live video feed over to the receiver and the
Figure 11: An image showing the flapping of the wings video feed can be used for surveillance or as an aid with the
ofKestrel, an ornithopter whose design similar to Garuda GPS location to effectively maneuver the ornithopter.

6.MAIN FRAME
The main frame of the ornithopter is a surprisingly simple
component from a design standpoint. Because the aping
mechanism is contained fully within the gearbox frame the
main frame of the machine serves mainly to provide mounting
locations for the rear wing mounts, electronic components,
battery, and tail assembly. There are two directions to go with
the frame design, either a single at plate which relies on its
own thickness for stillness, or a three dimensional design
made from much thinner material that gets its stillness from
the truss-like structure. If the frame had to be very still the Figure 11: A camera with a wireless transmitter to transmit live
second option would make for a much lighter and stronger video feed.
option, but in this case the frame really doesn't have to be very
still in all directions. The rear wing mount actually holds the 8. CONCLUSION
frame from flexing in the direction a sheet would be most The paper supports safe and secured concept of real time
weak because the wing spars form a very large and still video reception for defence. This method is proven to be
triangle. What this amounts to is that while the more fastest method of communicating data from remote place to a
complicated structure is often the higher stillness and lower defence station. It acts as boon to provide and keep good
weight option it doesn't come with much advantage in this security for the nation.
case. The frame is vastly easier to design and fabricate and
may even be lighter. References
Because the frame is really just a collection of mounting [1] Nathan Chronister. Ornithopter with independently
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attention to is the location of the center of gravity. Because the
Wisse. Efficient Bipedal robots based on passive-dynamic
data needed to work out the correct location theoretically isn't
available this was also scaled up from the Kestrel where the walkers.
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be about 4 inches behind the main wing spar. The material to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008
be used for the space frame tubular structure is carbon fibre
and the external profiling of the ornithopter is done using [4] J.D. DeLaurier. The development and testing of a fullscale
polyurethane foam or aluminium mesh.. piloted ornithopter
Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal, June 1999.
[5] J.D. DeLaurier. Ornithopter report update.
http://ornithopter.net/Publications/OrnithopterReportUpdate19
July2006.pdf, July 19, 2006.