Reusing discarded-smartphone capabilities on quadcopters: The rationale, benefits and issues

摘要

Smartphones have become a tremendous influence on human lives over the past decade. With attractive and advanced features integrated into smartphones, they are now considered more as a handheld computer than just a mobile phone. Driven by these improvements and desire for the latest devices, consumers replace their smartphones in a rapid rate, increasing the number of discarded devices. Fortunately, most capabilities of a discarded smartphone remain unharmed even after considerable damages, which make them ideal for reuse. In this study we demonstrate the reusability of these capabilities on micro aerial vehicles. Quadcopter is a micro aerial vehicle which has requirements such as sensor inputs, processing power, communication infrastructure and camera capabilities which the today's smartphone can accomplish independently. We focused on evaluating the possibility of reusing discarded smartphones to meet the requirements of quadcopters. Compared to traditional approaches of building quadcopters, reusing discarded devices has many advantages; low price, better performance, connectivity options and programming interfaces, etc. A statistical comparison was conducted to evaluate whether the remaining capabilities of a discarded smartphone are sufficient enough to meet the requirements of a quadcopter. The outcomes depicted that 87.5% of the features in smartphones correspond to those of quadcopters. To further illustrate the validity of our approach and to understand the practical issues, we then implemented several hardware and software applications as a proof-of-concept. Positive results achieved from the tests carried out to evaluate implementation components prove the suitability of our implementation methodologies to be utilized in real world applications.