Performance Assessment Framework for Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Microgravity Platforms

This paper presents a method to analyse multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAVs) as microgravity platforms. MUAVs can maintain a free-fall state and provide microgravity owing to their precise thrust control abilities. Moreover, MUAVs are affordable platforms that can be procured at low-cost. Although several MUAVs of various sizes and configurations exist, their capabilities as microgravity platforms are not readily available. Towards this, a framework is developed to estimate microgravity performance measures such as 0g-time, payload capacity, and 0g-quality for a given MUAV. The proposed estimation framework requires only the data provided by the MUAV manufacturer to compute all the microgravity performance measures. The performance as a microgravity platform of several existing MUAVs of various configurations, masses, sizes, and thrust capabilities is estimated by employing this framework. This analysis reveals that there exist MUAVs that can provide microgravity (of the order of \(10^{-2}g\)) for more than 4 s 0g-time while carrying more than 1 kg payloads. On the other hand, it is also shown that some MUAVs can carry payloads heavier than 90 kgs and provide microgravity for 2 s, which is comparable to the capability of some of the drop tower facilities.