Designing a hexacopter for the collection of atmospheric flow data

Vertical profiles of temperature, pressure, relative humidity, wind speed, and wind direction in the atmosphere are typically collected using radiosondes attached to free-flying or tethered balloons. This method is inefficient when data are only required for the first hundred feet above the ground. Free-flying balloons and the attached payload drift away from the launching location and are often not recovered. Tethered balloons require large amounts of helium and become unstable with increased winds, and inflating balloons takes an extended period of time and requires a skilled team. The scope of this project is to eliminate the impracticalities of balloon-based measurement systems by creating a recoverable, versatile, user-friendly unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The project requires development of a flight-control system, a data-collection system, and a communications and user interface. The development of the flight-control system involved researching autonomous flight controllers, followed by the construction, prototyping, and tuning of a hexacopter. Creating the data collection system required researching environmental sensors and determining the effects of the copter motion on sensor performance. The designed communications interface incorporated realtime data flow and local storage on the copter. The final product will be an autonomously flying hexacopter which can collect accurate weather-related data within the lowest 1000 feet of the atmosphere.