scholarly journals Selection of Solar Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for a Long Range Data Acquisition Chain

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2772
Author(s):  
Wiktor Woźniak ◽  
Mieczysław Jessa

The paper presents a long range data acquisition chain operating in areas without access to the electricity grid or communication infrastructure built with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is assumed that the length of the network chain significantly exceeds the flight range of a single drone. To build such a network three basic problems have to be solved. The first is energy harvesting for battery charging. The second concerns the choice of drone models that can cover a given distance in the shortest time. The third problem is the reduction of the flight range of drones as a function of payload mass. The evaluation of the proposed method is based on the results of simulations and cost analysis of 54 drones and 25 solar cells. The analysis ends with a proposition of seven steps that can help to choose the most suitable drone model for a given task.

Author(s):  
Rui Pedro Juliao ◽  
Amilton Amorim ◽  
João Paulo Hespanha ◽  
Guilherme Henrique Barros de Souza ◽  
Ronaldo Celso Messias Correia ◽  
...  

Promoting and managing sustainable territorial development require adequate tools that enable territorial managers to formulate appropriate choices. Technological solutions have emerged, and the paradigm has shifted from isolated GIS to a more collaborative production and dissemination of geographic data using spatial data infrastructures (SDI). A critical dataset for municipal land administration is cadastre. ISO 19152 standard of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) was published in 2012. Also, technology evolution, namely unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), has changed data acquisition for cadastre. These are three pillars of modern territorial management: openness, co-production, and data sharing (SDI); models (LADM); affordable technology (UAV). This chapter presents how municipalities can develop an SDI project, incorporating LADM guidelines and UAV data acquisition. The case study is based on a group of 32 small municipalities from São Paulo state, in Brazil, known as UNIPONTAL.


Drones ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Nex ◽  
Fabio Remondino

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has boomed in the last decade, making these flying platforms an instrument for everyday data acquisition in many applications such as 3D modeling [...]


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Hamurcu ◽  
Tamer Eren

The unmanned systems have been seeing a significant boom in the last ten years in different areas together with technological developments. One of the unmanned systems is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs are used for reconnaissance and observation in the military areas and play critical role in attack and destroy missions. These vehicles have been winning more features together with developing technology in todays world. In addition, they have been varying with different features. A systematic and efficient approach for the selection of the UAV is necessary to choose a best alternative for the critical tasks under consideration. The multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches that are analytic processes are well suited to deal intricacy in selection of alternative vehicles. This study also proposes an integrated methodology based on the analytic hierarch process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to evaluate UAV alternatives for selection process. Firstly, AHP, a MCDM method, is used to determine the weights of each critical factor. Subsequently, it is utilized with the TOPSIS approach to rank the vehicle alternatives in the decision problem. Result of the study shows that UAV-1 was selected as the most suitable vehicle. In results, it is seen that the weights of the evaluation criteria found by using AHP affect the decision-making process. Finally, the validation and sensitivity analysis of the solution are made and discussed.


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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