Microgravity Enabling Multirotors: Compact Like Drop Towers and Programmable Like Parabolic Flights

This work establishes multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as viable microgravity platforms. Towards this, a vertical microgravity enabling maneuver suitable for multirotors, control and automation strategies, and techniques to enhance the performance of multirotors as microgravity platforms are proposed. Successful microgravity enabling maneuvers are performed to show the proposed control and automation strategies’ effectiveness using two multirotor test vehicles. Further, this paper shows that all the existing multirotors can be microgravity platforms and provide a method to calculate the maximum microgravity duration a multirotor can provide. Finally, experiments are conducted onboard one of the multirotors executing a microgravity enabling maneuver to observe the effect of microgravity on liquid level in a capillary and liquid meniscus shape in a glass cuvette. These experiments and the microgravity enabling flight tests demonstrate that multirotors can be turned into microgravity platforms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the two UAVs presented in this paper are the first multirotor UAVs to achieve microgravity and the first UAVs—fixed-wing or rotary—to conduct onboard experiments in microgravity.