Study of noncontact current sensor for brushless motor to enhance the unmanned aerial vehicle performance

Applications of quadcopter or hexacopter have helped many scientists and engineers find lots of easiness for survey purposes, particularly in terms of accelerating data collection with high accuracy. For the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to be performing that kind of superior characteristic, direct-current brushless motor plays a very crucial role. In commercial UAV, the brushless motor obtains electric current from lithium-polymer batteries after being handled by an electronic speed controller. Despite the fact that the position of the motor is already sensed, the electric current response in the brushless motor due to applied voltage is also important to detect. This very-careful electric current detection will provide flight controller more detail information regarding the brushless motor performance. In this present study, a Hall-effect based non-contact sensor SS49E form measuring the electric current is introduced. Taking into consideration that small fluctuations of the electric signals sometimes cannot be detected by the Hall sensor, we then increased the magnetic flux by means of inserting half-circular toroids. Our experiment revealed that the approach was effective in such a way that almost all electric signals can be then recorded by the sensor. In addition, the phase modulation and speed-controlled data collection and analysis provided fundamental information that can be used by the flight controller for the more complete algorithm to increase the UAV performance.