After their work was published earlier this year, we caught up with Dr Aly Abidali and Dr Hasan Shaheed to get the story of how an undergraduate project became a world record holder.
Dr Aly Abidali and Dr Hasan Shaheed with their record breaking drone
Meet the researchers
Dr Aly Abidali is a Senior Mechanical Engineer at Utonomy Ltd. where he is currently working on a project to update water systems. Aly started his career as an undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at Queen Mary in 2009.
“After leaving Queen Mary I worked on a few projects; I’ve worked on solar power banks, drones and more recently I worked for the company Dyson, working on home appliances and technological improvements on consumer items.”
Dr Hasan Shaheed is a Reader in Robotics and Renewable Energy at Queen Mary.
“I have supervised numerous undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD projects in robotics and aerial vehicles, but this project was one of the first in solar micro aerial vehicles (MAV).”
From undergrad to PhD…
“When I was thinking about what to do for my third-year project, I looked at solar powered helicopters, and I didn’t find any of those sorts of helicopters at the time; I could only find solar powered fixed wing aircraft,” explains Aly.
“So, for my third-year project, I designed a solar powered quad rotor under the supervision of Hasan. It's similar to a helicopter in that it uses rotors, but it has four of them. That one used a solar panel to charge a battery which would be used to provide power for the propulsion system.
Then in my fourth-year Masters project, as a team with seven other students, we developed a proof-of-concept purely solar powered version without a battery.
My PhD then looked at the miniaturisation of these concepts, and that’s what led to what we have here today.”
The micro drone in flight
Getting published
“The system and the work that emerged with Aly was published in Nature Scientific Report” says Hasan, “and then other popular magazines were interested like PV Magazine who published a feature article referring to ‘the smallest multi rotor solar aerial vehicle in the world’, and that’s a prestigious achievement for us.”
Popular magazines were interested like PV Magazine who published a feature article referring to ‘the smallest multi rotor solar aerial vehicle in the world’, and that’s a prestigious achievement for us.
What are the features of the drone?
Aly points out the key features… “This aircraft is around 71 grams in terms of weight - it's the smallest solar-powered multi-rotor, micro-aerial vehicle in existence.
It can hibernate for approximately 38 days, and can take as little as 68 minutes to charge in ideal conditions determined using a solar array simulator which essentially simulates a solar panel in a controlled test environment.
It has a first-person view camera at the front and utilises coreless motors, which have a rotor lacking a heavy iron core, making them very suitable for this application as they are lighter and more responsive than traditional cored motors. The solar panel is also encapsulated to protect it from the environment."
Because it's very small in size, we can make a swarm of these for precision agriculture or monitoring of flooding or fire.
How could it be used?
Aly begins “The aircraft has energy autonomy, which essentially means that you can leave the aircraft outdoors and it doesn't have to be tethered to any base station. For example, if you want to monitor a location, maybe do surveillance of an area, you can - these can be sort of like fire-and-forget systems that stay out in the field. If you have multiple of these working together in a swarm configuration, you can also increase your mission success - in case you lose one for any reason, the others can continue on.”
Hasan continues, “It can be used for a variety of applications, including building inspections, traffic management, weather data collection and wildlife monitoring. Because it's very small in size, we can make a swarm of these for precision agriculture or monitoring of flooding or fire.”
The electronics are constantly improving and reducing in size, making these more and more viable as time goes by... This is the era of nanotechnology!
A lasting legacy
Hasan explains how he is developing Aly’s work with current students; “I have a project where we are trying to build a solar-powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned-aerial-system, supported by a company called UA Victor Aerospace Ltf. So, the project is ongoing and there will be a chance for Aly and his team and other people to contribute in future.”
“The electronics are constantly improving and reducing in size, making these more and more viable as time goes by” says Aly.
“This is the era of nanotechnology!” adds Hasan, “We previously used bigger drone systems for filming and monitoring, but now the same job can be done by a system like this. We want to make it smaller in future with more autonomy and more intelligence using AI and machine learning.”