Metamaterial Structural Design for Low-Frequency Vibration Attenuation in a Drone-Based Image Monitoring System

Drone-based monitoring technology finds increasing applications in various fields for a wide range of purposes. The performance of drone-based imaging monitoring systems is significantly affected by low-frequency vibrations originating from the drone’s fuselage during flight, leading to a decline in image quality and monitoring results. Considering the vibration characteristics and structure of the drone, a metamaterial structure with local resonant unit-cell is proposed in this paper, which addresses the mechanism, design, and analysis of the structure to achieve enhanced attenuation of the low-frequency vibrations. Correspondingly a numerical model is developed, allowing the band gap properties and transmission characteristics of the proposed metamaterial structure to be quantified with sufficient accuracy. A prototype of the metamaterial structure is fabricated using 3D printing and installed on the drone for experimental verification. The results demonstrate that the metamaterial structure can effectively mitigate the impact of low-frequency vibrations from the drone on the imaging system, surpassing the performance of the conventional solid structure. This achievement ensures a significant operating environment for drone-based image monitoring systems and provides insights into the metamaterial application to drones. Moreover, the design, analysis and fabrication can be applied to other similar systems.