Development and performance evaluation of a multi-rotor unmanned aircraft system for agricultural monitoring

Abstract

In modern agriculture production, to obtain real-time, accurate and comprehensive information of the farmlands is necessary for farmers. Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is one of the most popular platforms for agricultural information monitoring, especially the multi-rotor aircraft due to its simplicity of operation. It is easy to control the speed and altitude of multi-rotor aircraft, even at low altitude. The above features enable multi-rotor UAS to acquire high-resolution images at low altitudes by integrating different imaging sensors. The aim of this work was to develop an octocopter UAS for agricultural information monitoring. In order to obtain the high-resolution aerial images of the entire experimental field, the Sony Nex-7 camera was attached to the aircraft. According to the real-time position of the aircraft got from global position system (GPS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU), the flight control system of the aircraft will send signals to control the camera to capture images at desired locations. Besides, position and orientation system (POS) and an illuminance sensor were loaded on the aircraft to get the location, shooting angle and ambient illumination information of each image. The system can be used to collect the remote sensing data of a field, and the performance was comprehensively evaluated in the field of oilseed rape experimental station in Zhuji, Zhejiang Province, China. The result shows that the system can keep the camera optical axis perpendicular to the ground during the operation. Because the effective communication was established between the mission equipment and the flight control system, the UAS can accurately acquire the images at the pre-defined locations, which improved the operation efficiency of the system. The images collected by the system can be mosaicked into an image of the whole field. In summary, the system can satisfy the demand for the agricultural information collection.

Keywords

• |unmanned aircraft system|agricultural monitoring|remote sensing images|automatic flight|path planning|agricultural information acquisition