Reusing Discarded-Smartphone Capabilities on Quadcopters: The Rationale, Benefits and Issues

Abstract

Smartphones have become a tremendous in uence on human life over the past few decades. 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 the appetite for the latest and greatest devices, consumers replace their smartphones in a rapid rate, increasing the number of discarded devices. There could be many reasons for a smartphone to be discarded including but not limited to becoming obsolete, screen damages, water damages, new model arrivals and battery issues. Fortunately, most capabilities of a discarded smartphone remain unharmed even after damaging the visible surface, which makes them ideal for reuse. Quadcopters have requirements such as sensor inputs, processing power, communication infrastructure and camera capabilities which nowadays smartphone can accomplish independently. This makes the quadcopters a better platform to investigate the reusability of discarded smartphone capabilities. This research is focused on evaluating the possibility of reusing discarded smartphones to meet the requirements of quadcopters. We evaluate on reusing remaining discarded smartphone capabilities to achieve quadcopter functionalities. Compared with traditional approaches, utilizing discarded smartphones have many advantages; cost e ectiveness, performance, communication interfaces and mobile application programming interface. Initially a survey is conducted in order to gather information regarding discarded smartphones which aided to determine the possibilities as well as constraints regarding the intended research methodology. Based on the results of the survey a statistical comparison is conducted to prove that the remaining capabilities of a discarded smartphone are competent enough to meet the requirements of a quadcopter. We achieved 87.5% equivalence between the capabilities. Proposed here, is a novel approach for measuring the reusability of discarded smartphones in quadcopters. Hence, to demonstrate the validity of our approach and to understand the practical issues, we have then implemented several hardware and software applications for quadcopters utilizing smartphone features as a proof-of-concept. Numerous considerations that need to be measured when implementing these applications are widely discussed with relevant limitations. Furthermore, we have performed multiple tests to evaluate what has been developed and to prove that those developments are suitable enough to be utilized in real world applications.