LIDAR-Drone Mount
A 3D-printed mount that fixes a LIDAR scanner to a DJI Mavic 2 Pro and routes its wiring clear of the rotor blades. Built for a Mars-analog drone-mapping study at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS).
My contribution
I designed and 3D-printed the mount. A good friend, Rodrigo Schmitt, who was a PhD candidate at the time, asked me to build it, knowing I work as a mechanical engineer. My job was to fix the LIDAR to the drone and keep its wiring clear of the spinning rotors.
The research (LIDAR / IMU / GPS integration, ROS2, the Raspberry Pi, and the field testing at MDRS) was Rodrigo's and Crew 306's. I wasn't on the crew, so this page is just the mount.
Rodrigo's full project write-upDemo
The finished mount carrying the LIDAR on the drone.
Prototypes
Click a photo to open it full-size with its description.
3D Model
Drag to rotate · scroll to zoom · ⤢ Expand for cross-section, explode & isolate.
Design & constraints
The mount had to hold the LIDAR, plus its battery and converters, under a DJI Mavic 2 Pro, stay under the drone's 700 g payload limit, keep the sensor rigid, and route the wiring clear of the rotor blades. No CAD model of the drone was available, so I traced a caliper-scaled photo in SolidWorks and built the mount against real dimensions.
Iteration in SLA resin
I printed on SLA resin for fast turnaround. First in Formlabs Fast Model to check fit, then Formlabs Tough 2000 for the final part.
What broke
Chasing the payload budget, I thinned the walls too far. A crash in the field fractured the final mount, but Rodrigo kept flying on an earlier version and the spare hardware I'd sent. Next time I'd keep more material in the load paths and save weight only in the low-stress areas. I'd also validate the mount against impact, not just steady flight loads: a drop test and an FEA impact study to estimate peak stresses on a hard landing, plus a fillet review to pull stress concentrations out of the thin sections. Designing for the crash case, not only the hover case, is the real lesson.
Reference documents
I designed the mount straight off the sensor's datasheet — using it to pin down the LIDAR's mounting-hole pattern, hole spacing, and screw thread sizes so the printed part and hardware matched the real unit.
Full project by Rodrigo Schmitt, MDRS Crew 306 & Purdue SEARCH. Read the write-up.