Simulation and Development of an Autonomous Drone for Delivery of Medicines during COVID-19

The main goal of this research paper is to develop an autonomous medicine delivery quadcopter and validate a simulator model for it. It is intended to use this drone in crisis of COVID-19 due to restriction of social distancing and unavailability of regular hospital facilities. A simulator is then modified and used as a pre-mission tool to predict mission outcome and after validation, it will be used to predict complex missions without actually risking the expensive drone. An efficient payload system is designed and constructed for the quadcopter to fulfill its delivery purpose. Once the drone is assembled along with the payload mechanism, its physical parameters are calculated using SolidWorks. The same parameters such as performance coefficients and moments of inertia are then updated in the simulator’s quadcopter properties. The equations of motions model used is improved by including physical theoretical effects. In the end, same autonomous delivery mission tests have been done for the real quadcopter and the simulator in order to compare the results and show the effect of improved equations of motion and physical parameters.