• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.95-103
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• 2024

The propulsion technology used in unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)—which represent one of the most important development directions in aviation—is significantly related to their flight performance. This review paper discusses the different types of propulsion technologies used in unmanned aerial vehicles, namely the internal combustion engine (reciprocating, rotary, and gas turbine engines), the hybrid system, and the pure electric system. In particular, this paper presents and discusses the classification, working principles, characteristics, and critical technologies of these types of propulsion systems. These findings are expected to be helpful in establishing a development framework, comprehensive views, and multiple comparisons of future UAV propulsion systems.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.273-279
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• 2021

A flight control computer(FLCC) applied to an unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) is a safety-critical item, and which is designed in a multiple structure to increase the reliability of operation by securing fault tolerance. These FLCC of multiple structure should be designed so that each independent processing/control components can perform the same operation at the same time. And for this reason, a synchronization algorithm for synchronizing the operation between FLCCs should be included in an operational flight program. In this paper, we propose a software design method for synchronization between dual FLCCs applied to UAVs. The proposed synchronization method is designed to synchronize using only the minimum hardware resources to reduce a failure rate. In addition, the proposed synchronization method is designed to minimized synchronization errors due to a timer operation by designing in consideration of operation characteristics of the hardware timer used for the synchronization.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.284-291
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• 2017

There is no doubt that advances in UAV technology have improved military performance. However, these advances require humans to adapt to new and complex operational systems. UAV has been rapidly expanding to a variety of fields such as reconnaissance, transportation, communication and aerial photographing recently. Also, with the development of UAV automation technology, one operator is able to supervisory-control multiple-UAVs. However, as the number of assigned UAV increases, the amount of information increases and this results in the workload of the operator increasing and deterioration in controlling performance. Accordingly, there is a need for a model to determine the level of overload an operator may encounter with regard to multiple-UAV but nationally this kind of research is currently lacking. Therefore, this paper provides an experimental platform for evaluating workload index effectiveness integrating multiple-UAV operational environments, GCS, and eye-tracking system followed by a limited survey of domestic and international studies of multi-UAV overload studies.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.65-71
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a design method for the construction of LTE-based small unmanned aerial vehicle control system to quickly and reliably collect multiple small unmanned aerial vehicle position information simultaneously flying all over the country. In particular, the main requirements are the network (N/W), hardware (H/ W), software(SW), Database(DB), development architecture, and business needs. To satisfy these requirements, N/W, H/W, SW, DB design, and architectural design plan were suggested regarding the design requirements of a small UAV system. To effectively control the small unmanned multi-party system in the system design, the architecture is divided into the front-end service area and the back-end service area according to the function and role of the unit system. In the front-end service area that grasps and controls the position and state of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), we have studied the design part that can be expanded to N through TCP/IP network by applying Client PC method.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2017.04a
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• pp.45-45
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• 2017

On-site monitoring of vegetable growth parameters, such as leaf length, leaf area, and fresh weight, in an agricultural field can provide useful information for farmers to establish farm management strategies suitable for optimum production of vegetables. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently gaining a growing interest for agricultural applications. This study reports on validation testing of previously developed vegetable growth estimation models based on UAV-based RGB images for white radish and Chinese cabbage. Specific objective was to investigate the potential of the UAV-based RGB camera system for effectively quantifying temporal and spatial variability in the growth status of white radish and Chinese cabbage in a field. RGB images were acquired based on an automated flight mission with a multi-rotor UAV equipped with a low-cost RGB camera while automatically tracking on a predefined path. The acquired images were initially geo-located based on the log data of flight information saved into the UAV, and then mosaicked using a commerical image processing software. Otsu threshold-based crop coverage and DSM-based crop height were used as two predictor variables of the previously developed multiple linear regression models to estimate growth parameters of vegetables. The predictive capabilities of the UAV sensing system for estimating the growth parameters of the two vegetables were evaluated quantitatively by comparing to ground truth data. There were highly linear relationships between the actual and estimated leaf lengths, widths, and fresh weights, showing coefficients of determination up to 0.7. However, there were differences in slope between the ground truth and estimated values lower than 0.5, thereby requiring the use of a site-specific normalization method.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.306-317
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• 2017

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) became popular platforms for the collection of remotely sensed data in the last years. This study deals with the monitoring of multi-temporal onion growth with very high resolution by means of low-cost equipment. The concept of the monitoring was estimation of multi-temporal onion growth using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and meteorological factors. For this study, UAV imagery was taken on the Changnyeong, Hapcheon and Muan regions eight times from early February to late June during the onion growing season. In precision agriculture frequent remote sensing on such scales during the vegetation period provided important spatial information on the crop status. Meanwhile, four plant growth parameters, plant height (P.H.), leaf number (L.N.), plant diameter (P.D.) and fresh weight (F.W.) were measured for about three hundred plants (twenty plants per plot) for each field campaign. Three meteorological factors included average temperature, rainfall and irradiation over an entire onion growth period. The multiple linear regression models were suggested by using stepwise regression in the extraction of independent variables. As a result, $NDVI_{UAV}$ and rainfall in the model explain 88% and 68% of the P.H. and F.W. with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 7.29 cm and 59.47 g, respectively. And $NDVI_{UAV}$ in the model explain 43% of the L.N. with a RMSE of 0.96. These lead to the result that the characteristics of variations in onion growth according to $NDVI_{UAV}$ and other meteorological factors were well reflected in the model.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.35-41
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• 2018

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been used for various purposes in multiple fields, such as observation, communication relaying, and information acquisition. Nowadays, UAVs must have high performance in order to acquire more precise information in larger amounts than is now possible while performing for long periods. At present, domestically, a high-altitude long-endurance UAV (HALE UAV) for long-term flight in the stratosphere has been developed in order to replace some functions of the satellite. In this study, as a part of structural soundness evaluation of the aircraft structure developed for the HALE UAV, the structural soundness of the fasteners of the fuselage and tail is evaluated by calculating the margin of safety(M.S). The result confirms the validity of the design of the fasteners in the aircraft structure of the UAV.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.25 no.4_2
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• pp.655-662
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• 2022

Recently, with the increase in the use of UAV(unmanned aerial vehicles), research on horizontal maintenance stations that can take off and land in various environments has been actively conducted. These stations can safely land UAV through multiple DOF(degrees of freedom) or at least 2-DOF-based actuator actuation. Among them, many researchers are dealing with the multi-DOF stewart platform due to its high safety. However, the stewart platform requires high-precision control technology because it requires a lot of torque to actuate according to the load action. Therefore, in this paper, to solve the mentioned problem, a bevel gear-based 2-DOF horizontal maintenance station system is proposed. The proposed system is configured to prevent damage due to air resistance when maintaining ships and to install it in a small space. Also, in terms of system configuration, the bevel gear-based horizontal maintenance system has the main advantage of being able to take off and land UAVs of various sizes through the replacement of station pads. The driving of the system consists of a simple form that can control the motor by adjusting the rotation speed of the motor according to the sea waveform.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1392-1413
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• 2022

In order to meet the rapid development of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication needs, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) helps to identify unused spectrum for the primary users (PU). However, multi-UAV mode (MUM) requires the large communication resource in a cognitive UAV network, resulting in a severe decline of spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) and increase of energy consumption (EC). On this account, we extend the traditional 2D spectrum space to 3D spectrum space for the UAV network scenario and enable UAVs to proceed with spectrum sensing behaviors in this paper, and propose a novel multi-slot mode (MSM), in which the sensing slot is divided into multiple mini-slots within a UAV. Then, the CSS process is developed into a composite hypothesis testing problem. Furthermore, to improve SE and EE and reduce EC, we use the sequential detection to make a global decision about the PU channel status. Based on this, we also consider a truncation scenario of the sequential detection under the sensing delay constraint, and further derive a closed-form performance expression, in terms of the CSS performance and cooperative efficiency. At last, the simulation results verify that the performance and cooperative efficiency of MSM outperforms that of the traditional MUM in a low EC.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.78-85
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• 2023

For Multi-UAV systems, a task allocation could be a key factor to determine the capability to perform a task. In this paper, we proposed a task allocation method based on genetic algorithm for minimizing makespan and satisfying various constraints. To obtain the optimal solution of the task allocation problem, a huge calculation effort is necessary. Therefore, a genetic algorithm-based method could be an alternative to get the answer. Many types of UAVs, tasks, and constraints in real worlds are introduced and considered when tasks are assigned. The proposed method can build the task sequence of each UAV and calculate waiting time before beginning tasks related to constraints. After initial task allocation with a genetic algorithm, waiting time is added to satisfy constraints. Multiple numerical simulation results validated the performance of this mission planning method with minimized makespan.