Test Platform and Graphical User Interface Design for Vertical Take-Off and Landing Drones

Abstract

We present a novel test system for pre-flight control and test of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) drones. This system includes a test platform consisting of nested circles in three different dimensions, a graphical user interface, and wireless communication modules. Thanks to this proposed test platform, basic axis tests (yaw, pitch, roll, elevation) can be done before the flight of a VTOL multi rotor drone, thus the problem or crash will be obstructed in the flight of a VTOL multi rotor drone. In addition to this test platform, we present a graphical user interface (GUI) for sending the test commands and receiving values from all sensors on the VTOL multi rotor drone board. The graphical analysis of all data, such as motor rpm value, velocity, angular value, etc., can be observed by the proposed test GUI. Also, the desired flight control parameters can be sent via a graphical interface to the VTOL multi rotor drone's board on the test platform. The wireless communication modules have been used between the VTOL multi rotor drone board and the computer consisting of the test GUI. In this study, the test system designed for VTOL multi rotor drone is given in detail. To show the performance of the UAV test system, some pre-flight tests are represented for the VTOL multi rotor drones with six rotors.