Development of Chemical Reaction Airbag Safety System for Multi-Rotor UAV to Mitigate Free-fall Collision Impact

Author

• Brady Kent Villiger, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2026

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Engineering Science

First Advisor

Eslamiat, Hossein

Abstract

With Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) becoming more advanced, the demand of companies that plan to use them for commercial use has only increased. Amazon plans to use UAVs for shipping purposes, Esri uses UAVs for surveying purposes, and many government organizations use UAVs for search and rescue, infrastructure inspection, and power line inspection. With all these uses, UAV safety becomes a major concern. If a UAV were to fail mid-flight there would be an issue if it collided with a person or an expensive piece of equipment after a free-fall. In this paper, the proposed safety system would be a specialized air bag that would inflate if the UAV were to plummet and cushion the impact of both it and the object it collides with. Airbags have been mandatory in all cars since 1999, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2017 that they have saved more than 50,457 lives. Because of this, the implementation of an airbag system on a UAV could reduce damage done to personnel or property in a UAV system failure. This research proposes a chemically inflated airbag that reduces the impact force of a falling drone, and compared to current compressed-air airbags, has advantages like faster deployment time and requiring less space on UAVs. We design, build and test the proposed airbag system, which is able to reduce the impact force by 3100 N utilizing our drop test apparatus.