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Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software

UAV technology is becoming increasingly mature and cheap. This recent cost reduction and performance improvement means that these systems have become reliable and cheap enough to be viable for mass use by farmers and operators for precision agriculture activities; such as disease identification, yie...

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Main Authors: Matthew Coombes, Wen-Hua Chen, Cunjia Liu
Format: Default Conference proceeding
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2134/37151
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author Matthew Coombes
Wen-Hua Chen
Cunjia Liu
author_facet Matthew Coombes
Wen-Hua Chen
Cunjia Liu
author_sort Matthew Coombes (1254945)
collection Figshare
description UAV technology is becoming increasingly mature and cheap. This recent cost reduction and performance improvement means that these systems have become reliable and cheap enough to be viable for mass use by farmers and operators for precision agriculture activities; such as disease identification, yield estimation and plant nitrogen monitoring. A critical stage of this is the planning of the flight path which ensures complete image coverage of the region of interest. If the field is a simple convex shape, then generating an optimal coverage path is hugely simplified by using a back and forth Boustrophedon path. However, most fields have complex polygonal shapes, where planning the coverage path manually is nontrivial, as operators may not have the correct skills and experience. This is why in this paper, we outline an algorithm to improve the performance of survey path generation on complex ROI for mission planning software. The tools implemented in this paper take into account environmental factors and aircraft dynamics. By decomposing these complex survey regions into many smaller arrangements of manageable convex polygon survey regions, Boustrophedon paths can be used to cover them. By using a survey model for calculation of flight time in a wind field. it is used to optimise the decomposition in order to lower flight time. The fastest survey path is used to generate waypoints files to be used with a number of popular mission planning software including: DJI PC Ground Control, Mission Planner, QGroundControl.
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institution Loughborough University
publishDate 2018
record_format Figshare
spelling rr-article-92219032018-01-01T00:00:00Z Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software Matthew Coombes (1254945) Wen-Hua Chen (1251597) Cunjia Liu (1176420) Other engineering not elsewhere classified Aerial surveying Remote sensing Polygon decomposition Coverage path planning Boustrophedon paths Mission planning and ground control station Engineering not elsewhere classified UAV technology is becoming increasingly mature and cheap. This recent cost reduction and performance improvement means that these systems have become reliable and cheap enough to be viable for mass use by farmers and operators for precision agriculture activities; such as disease identification, yield estimation and plant nitrogen monitoring. A critical stage of this is the planning of the flight path which ensures complete image coverage of the region of interest. If the field is a simple convex shape, then generating an optimal coverage path is hugely simplified by using a back and forth Boustrophedon path. However, most fields have complex polygonal shapes, where planning the coverage path manually is nontrivial, as operators may not have the correct skills and experience. This is why in this paper, we outline an algorithm to improve the performance of survey path generation on complex ROI for mission planning software. The tools implemented in this paper take into account environmental factors and aircraft dynamics. By decomposing these complex survey regions into many smaller arrangements of manageable convex polygon survey regions, Boustrophedon paths can be used to cover them. By using a survey model for calculation of flight time in a wind field. it is used to optimise the decomposition in order to lower flight time. The fastest survey path is used to generate waypoints files to be used with a number of popular mission planning software including: DJI PC Ground Control, Mission Planner, QGroundControl. 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Text Conference contribution 2134/37151 https://figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Fixed_wing_UAV_survey_coverage_path_planning_in_wind_for_improving_existing_ground_control_station_software/9221903 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
spellingShingle Other engineering not elsewhere classified
Aerial surveying
Remote sensing
Polygon decomposition
Coverage path planning
Boustrophedon paths
Mission planning and ground control station
Engineering not elsewhere classified
Matthew Coombes
Wen-Hua Chen
Cunjia Liu
Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
title Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
title_full Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
title_fullStr Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
title_full_unstemmed Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
title_short Fixed wing UAV survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
title_sort fixed wing uav survey coverage path planning in wind for improving existing ground control station software
topic Other engineering not elsewhere classified
Aerial surveying
Remote sensing
Polygon decomposition
Coverage path planning
Boustrophedon paths
Mission planning and ground control station
Engineering not elsewhere classified
url https://hdl.handle.net/2134/37151