Design and fabrication of solar powered unmanned aerial vehicle for border surveillance

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are one of the important types of aircraft, which are controlled by a remote controller or pre-programmed method. Nowadays UAV is being proposed for many critical applications including surveillance, mapping, etc. In general, the surveillance around the international border has been carried out by soldiers. Monitoring the border through soldiers is not perfect surveillance, due to the natural factors of human beings may be the error will occur in the border surveillance. To avoid this problem, the monitoring of the border region is to be covered by UAV. Enemy’s activities around the dangerous and large border coverage area are difficult task to handle in border monitoring, so a normal UAV is not suitable for this process. Hence advanced solar UAV is a better solution for this monitoring because it’s having unique characters like high operational speed, more stability, long life, etc. This paper proposed to motivate research on aerospace renewable energy sources and primary aims are to make calculations and respective designs to create an e-aircraft model, capable of powering its flight using solar energy, overcoming the challenges by increasing the speed, range, and endurance of the UAV using the solar power in order to provide full-time border surveillance. The overall 3D solar UAV is modeled by CATIA V5 with the inclusion of theoretical design values. The intruders detection in borders through image processing has been completed using MATLAB.