Engineering Commons^™

A Water-Surface Self-Leveling Landing Platform For Small-Scale Uavs, Mbidi Santos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Because many of the most widely used UAVs, such as the Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL), cannot land securely on sloped or fast-changing surfaces, there is a need to design better deployment and landing stations. This document proposes an approach to design a water-surface self-leveling landing platform by implementing the best concept to be used as a safe ground for UAVs to land and deploy on open waters. After conceptualizing multiple design ideas, these options were laid out in a decision matrix with four criteria: degrees of freedom, mechanical complexity, manufacturing, and cost. The chosen concept was the spherical parallel …