Validation of the Manual Indoor UAV Flying Characteristics Methodology

In recent years, drones have experienced rapid technological development. The new EU regulations, therefore, apply to both users as well as manufacturers of unmanned aerial vehicles. The mentioned legislation does not yet precisely define the testing methodology and methods of required parameters of each individual category of unmanned aerial vehicles. This study pays special attention to the possibility of dynamic indoor testing of multicopters. It raises the research question of the possibility of experimental determination of the pitch angle as a partial characterisation of a vehicle in flight with manual control of a multicopter against continuous airflow. A simplified wind tunnel generated the airflow with a lamella regulator. Three 10 minute experimental flights were performed against an airflow rate of 1.45 / 2.43 / 3.42 m/s. The task of an experienced pilot was to keep the multicopter in the middle of the airflow during hover manoeuvre. The flight data of the multicopter were recorded by an inertial motion capture (MoCap) system Inertia ProMove in the form of a quaternion and linear accelerations. The results of the study do not show an increase in the median value of the pitch angle of the quadcopter when manually maintaining the hover against the airflow rate in the wind tunnels. On the contrary, as expected, the correlation of the pitch quadcopter and forward linear acceleration was demonstrated. This pilot study presents a possible methodology for indoor testing of a partial aspect of the flight characteristics while drawing attention to the problem of such dynamic testing.