scholarly journals Active stabilization of unmanned aerial vehicle imaging platform

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (19-20) ◽  
pp. 1791-1803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohit Verma ◽  
Vicente Lafarga ◽  
Mael Baron ◽  
Christophe Collette

The advancement in technology has seen a rapid increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for various applications. These unmanned aerial vehicles are often equipped with the imaging platform like a camera. During the unmanned aerial vehicle flight, the camera is subjected to vibrations which hamper the quality of the captured images/videos. The high-frequency vibrations from the unmanned aerial vehicle are transmitted to the camera. Conventionally, passive rubber mounts are used to isolate the camera from the drone vibrations. The passive mounts are able to provide reduction in response near the resonance. However, this comes at the cost of amplification of response at the higher frequency. This article proposes an active vibration isolation system which exhibits improved performance at the higher frequencies than the conventional system. The active isolation system consists of a contact-less voice coil actuator supported by four springs. Experiments are carried out to study the effect of vibrations on the quality of images captured. The characterization of drone vibrations is also carried out by recording the acceleration during different flight modes. The performance of the proposed isolation system is experimentally validated on a real drone camera subjected to the recorded drone acceleration spectrum. The isolation system is found to perform better than the conventional rubber mounts and is able to reduce the vibrations to a factor of one-fourth. It can be effectively used to improve the image acquisition quality of the unmanned aerial vehicles.

Agronomy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qinggang Xiao ◽  
Fang Xin ◽  
Zhaoxia Lou ◽  
Tingting Zhou ◽  
Guobin Wang ◽  
...  

Defoliant spraying is an important aspect of mechanized cotton harvesting. Fully and uniformly spraying defoliant could improve the quality of defoliation and reduce the impurity content in cotton. Improving the coverage of defoliant droplets in the middle and lower layers of cotton and ensuring the full and even dispersion of droplets in the cotton canopy are essentially in increasing the defoliation effect. In this study, we assessed the effect of aviation spray adjuvants on droplet deposition, defoliation, boll opening and defoliant retention in cotton leaves sprayed by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The results showed that adding aviation spray adjuvants could significantly improve the defoliant droplet deposition. Fifteen days after spraying, the defoliation rate was 80.31% and the boll opening was 90.61%. The defoliation rate increased by 3.12–34.62% and the boll opening rate increased by 6.67–29.56% after the addition of aviation spray adjuvants. Using a vegetable oil adjuvant could significantly increase the droplet coverage rate and the retention of defoliants in cotton leaves.


2021 ◽  
Vol 263 (3) ◽  
pp. 3584-3594
Author(s):  
Yameizhen Li ◽  
Benjamin Yen ◽  
Yusuke Hioka

Recording speech from unmanned aerial vehicles has been attracting interest due to its broad application including filming, search and rescue, and surveillance. One of the challenges in this problem is the quality of the speech recorded due to contamination by various interfering noise. In particular, noise contamination due to those radiated by the unmanned aerial vehicles rotors significantly impacts the overall quality of the audio recordings. Multi-channel Wiener filter has been a commonly used technique for speech enhancement because of its robustness under practical setup. Existing studies have also utilised such techniques in speech enhancement for unmanned aerial vehicle recordings, such as the well-known beamformer with postfiltering framework. However, many variants of the multi-channel Wiener filter have also been developed over recent years such as the speech distortion weighted multi-channel Wiener filter. To address these recent advancements, in this study we compare the performance of these variants of techniques. In particular, we explore the benefits these techniques may bring forth in the setting of audio recordings from an unmanned aerial vehicle.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 5772
Author(s):  
Dawid Lis ◽  
Adam Januszko ◽  
Tadeusz Dobrocinski

The purpose of this article is to present and discuss the results of a non-standard unnamed aerial vehicle construction with a constant cross-section square-shaped avionic profile. Based on the model’s in-air observed maneuverability, the research of avionic construction behavior was carried out in a water tunnel. The results show the model’s specific lift capabilities in comparison to classical avionic constructions. The characteristic results of the lift coefficient showed that the unmanned aerial vehicle presents favorable features than classic avionic constructions. The model was created with the prospect of using it in the future for dual-use purposes, where unmanned aerial vehicles are currently experiencing very rapid development. When creating the prototype, the focus was on low production cost, as well as convenience in operation. The development of this type of breakthrough avionic solution, which shows extraordinary maneuverability, may contribute to increasing the popularity and, above all, the availability of unmanned aerial vehicles for the largest possible group of recipients because of high avionic properties in relation to the technical construction complexity.


Author(s):  
E. G. Semenova ◽  
◽  
M. I. Bakustina ◽  

The article is devoted to the creation of a method for preparing an unmanned aerial vehicle for implementation as a finished packaged product. To achieve the goal, modern methods of standardization and quality control are used.


Author(s):  
Hongbo Xin ◽  
Yujie Wang ◽  
Xianzhong Gao ◽  
Qingyang Chen ◽  
Bingjie Zhu ◽  
...  

The tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles have the advantages of multi-rotors and fixed-wing aircrafts, such as vertical takeoff and landing, long endurance and high-speed cruise. These make the tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle capable for special tasks in complex environments. In this article, we present the modeling and the control system design for a quadrotor tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle whose main structure consists of a traditional quadrotor with four wings fixed on the four rotor arms. The key point of the control system is the transition process between hover flight mode and level flight mode. However, the normal Euler angle representation cannot tackle both of the hover and level flight modes because of the singularity when pitch angle tends to [Formula: see text]. The dual-Euler method using two Euler-angle representations in two body-fixed coordinate frames is presented to couple with this problem, which gives continuous attitude representation throughout the whole flight envelope. The control system is divided into hover and level controllers to adapt to the two different flight modes. The nonlinear dynamic inverse method is employed to realize fuselage rotation and attitude stabilization. In guidance control, the vector field method is used in level flight guidance logic, and the quadrotor guidance method is used in hover flight mode. The framework of the whole system is established by MATLAB and Simulink, and the effectiveness of the guidance and control algorithms are verified by simulation. Finally, the flight test of the prototype shows the feasibility of the whole system.


Author(s):  
Salim A. Mouloua ◽  
James Ferraro ◽  
Mustapha Mouloua ◽  
P.A. Hancock

The present study was designed to examine the research trends in the literature focusing on Human Factors issues relevant to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems. As these UAV technologies continue to proliferate with increasing autonomy and supervisory control requirements, it is crucial to evaluate the current and emerging research trends across the generations. This paper reviews the research trends of 228 papers matching our search criteria. The search retained only relevant and complete papers published over the past thirty years (1988-2017) in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Results were tabulated, graphed, and discussed based on research categories, topic areas, authors’ affiliation, and sources of funding. Results showed a substantial increase in the number of articles in the last two decades, with most papers driven by academic institutions and military and government agencies.


Author(s):  
S. Sakthi Anand ◽  
R. Mathiyazaghan

<p class="Default">Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have gained well known attention in recent years for a numerous applications such as military, civilian surveillance operations as well as search and rescue missions. The UAVs are not controlled by professional pilots and users have less aviation experience. Therefore it seems to be purposeful to simplify the process of aircraft controlling. The objective is to design, fabricate and implement an unmanned aerial vehicle which is controlled by means of voice recognition. In the proposed system, voice commands are given to the quadcopter to control it autonomously. This system is navigated by the voice input. The control system responds to the voice input by voice recognition process and corresponding algorithms make the motors to run at specified speeds which controls the direction of the quadcopter.</p>


Author(s):  
Jun Tang ◽  
Jiayi Sun ◽  
Cong Lu ◽  
Songyang Lao

Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory planning is one of the most complex global optimum problems in multi-unmanned aerial vehicle coordinated control. Results of recent research works on trajectory planning reveal persisting theoretical and practical problems. To mitigate them, this paper proposes a novel optimized artificial potential field algorithm for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle operations in a three-dimensional dynamic space. For all purposes, this study considers the unmanned aerial vehicles and obstacles as spheres and cylinders with negative electricity, respectively, while the targets are considered spheres with positive electricity. However, the conventional artificial potential field algorithm is restricted to a single unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory planning in two-dimensional space and usually fails to ensure collision avoidance. To deal with this challenge, we propose a method with a distance factor and jump strategy to resolve common problems such as unreachable targets and ensure that the unmanned aerial vehicle does not collide into the obstacles. The method takes companion unmanned aerial vehicles as the dynamic obstacles to realize collaborative trajectory planning. Besides, the method solves jitter problems using the dynamic step adjustment method and climb strategy. It is validated in quantitative test simulation models and reasonable results are generated for a three-dimensional simulated urban environment.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1877 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Emery ◽  
John Schmalzel

The recent proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms has greatly increased our ability to remotely sense the Earth’s surface from the air at particularly low altitudes. [...]


2019 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 003685041987775 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanpeng Hu ◽  
Yanping Yang ◽  
Xiaoping Ma ◽  
Shu Li

The near-space solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle has broad prospects in application owing to its high altitude long-endurance performance. Launching solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle into the near-space with balloon-borne approach has advantages over the traditional sliding take-off methods, in that it is able to quickly and safely cross the turbulent zone. In this article, we investigate the control technology of balloon-borne launching for the solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. First, the motion of the launching process is divided into longitudinal and lateral-directional motion, with the longitudinal process and its equation addressed in detail. We then analyze the flight state and restriction conditions that the unmanned aerial vehicle should meet during the process. Second, the target variables and constraints are selected to formulate the optimization problem. The control variable parameterization method is applied to find the optimal pitch angle in the releasing-and-pulling process. More explicitly, a three-channel attitude stabilization controller is designed, in which the longitudinal channel takes the optimal pitch angle as the pitch instruction, the transverse channel carries out the zero control of the inclination angle, and the course channel takes the stabilization control, respectively. Numerical simulation results show that our proposed control design is capable of accelerating the solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles from the vertical state and pulling them up to the horizontal cruising flight state, with the flight angle of attack, the maximum speed, and the maximum axial acceleration in the pulling process all within the designed range.


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