Design and Development of Modular Cargo Casings for Lightweight Drones

In emergencies, the ability to rapidly design, build, and attach cargo casings to lightweight drones for transporting first-aid kits and medicines is highly valuable. This work contributes to this goal by using 3D scanning, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), 3D printing, and flight testing to develop aerodynamically efficient, modular cargo casings. To ensure consistency between computational approaches and flight testing, the computer-aided design (CAD) model of the drone is derived from a 3D scan of the physical drone, and CAD models of the cargo casings are 3D printed. Results show that modular cargo casings can be rapidly developed, offering an effective approach to emergency medical deliveries and rapid-response logistics. This rapid-prototyping workflow can also be carried out by an interdisciplinary team of early-career researchers, providing hands-on training while achieving the cargo-casing design objective.