Development of autonomous unmanned helicopter based agricultural remote sensing system

Abstract

Remote sensing (RS) is a very promising data collection tool for precision agriculture andhas been widely used for many decades. However, the relative low spatial and temporal resolutionare the major drawbacks for traditional RS platforms (such as satellites and piloted aircrafts). Thisstudy discusses the development of agricultural remote sensing system using autonomousunmanned helicopter to acquire the crop field image at the right time and right place with high imageresolution. The helicopter was equipped with a global positioning system (GPS), an inertialmeasurement units (IMU) and a geomagnetic sensor to detect the position, attitude and velocity ofthe helicopter. An autonomous controller was used to control helicopter to reach desired positions. Amulti-spectral camera was mounted on the helicopter using a pan/tilt platform which can adjust thecamera posture according to attitude of the helicopter to avoid the image distortion. A ground stationcomputer was used to communicate with the helicopter in real-time to monitor flight parameters andsend out control command. The images captured from this system are suitable for multi-purposeagricultural RS research.