• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.162-168
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• 2018

The UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) system, including the drone of a variety of fields, which has become an issue and utilized in various fields, has begun to develop in military fields and is actively developed in the commercial field. In various types of UAV systems, which have been developed recently, the communication system that is responsible for the connection between the ground control unit and the UAVs is called the data link. Especially, common data link used in military UAVs is required stability of communication to transmit surveillance and reconnaissance intelligence information and UAV's status. In this paper, the requirement for a modem was defined to secure the communication stability of the common data link used in surveillance UAVs. And, the design of the data link modem to satisfy applicable specifications was proposed. The proposed modem design was verified through the performance measurement of the implemented systems.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.126-137
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• 2016

Purpose: The overall objective of this study was to evaluate the vegetation fraction of soybeans, grown under different cropping conditions using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a red, green, and blue (RGB) camera. Methods: Test plots were prepared based on different cropping treatments, i.e., soybean single-cropping, with and without herbicide application and soybean and barley-cover cropping, with and without herbicide application. The UAV flights were manually controlled using a remote flight controller on the ground, with 2.4 GHz radio frequency communication. For image pre-processing, the acquired images were pre-treated and georeferenced using a fisheye distortion removal function, and ground control points were collected using Google Maps. Tarpaulin panels of different colors were used to calibrate the multi-temporal images by converting the RGB digital number values into the RGB reflectance spectrum, utilizing a linear regression method. Excess Green (ExG) vegetation indices for each of the test plots were compared with the M-statistic method in order to quantitatively evaluate the greenness of soybean fields under different cropping systems. Results: The reflectance calibration methods used in the study showed high coefficients of determination, ranging from 0.8 to 0.9, indicating the feasibility of a linear regression fitting method for monitoring multi-temporal RGB images of soybean fields. As expected, the ExG vegetation indices changed according to different soybean growth stages, showing clear differences among the test plots with different cropping treatments in the early season of < 60 days after sowing (DAS). With the M-statistic method, the test plots under different treatments could be discriminated in the early seasons of <41 DAS, showing a value of M > 1. Conclusion: Therefore, multi-temporal images obtained with an UAV and a RGB camera could be applied for quantifying overall vegetation fractions and crop growth status, and this information could contribute to determine proper treatments for the vegetation fraction.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.373-401
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• 2015

The UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Drone) technology has been undergoing rapid progress, accompanied with a growth in the market. However, domestic industry standards and technology lag behind such progress happening on the international scene, and in particular in developed countries. Related regulations are also deemed lacking to address the issues that arise with such developments. Meanwhile, as the rise of UAV technology is a fairly recent phenomenon, the gap between Korea and developed countries is not too big. As this technology has high relevance to information and communication technologies, it also offers ample leeway for Korea to catch up in the field of UAV. As such, this paper seeks to provide a survey of the overall technology, market and regulations concerning UAV to identify possible measures on how to address any issues that may arise through proper policies. Due to the progress made in the field of UAV technology and increased penetration rate, striking a right balance between putting in place a proper regulatory system and establishing policies that foster growth in the field has risen as a very important issue. While the importance of establishing a legal system that helps prevent possible risks is indeed important, it must also be acknowledged that excessive regulation can also hinder technological progress. This, in turn would stagnate the market and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit in the society. In the case of new, practical technologies such as UAV, a prompt establishment of regulatory systems and policy measures in terms of policies is a requisite. In brief, in order to promote progress in the UAV industry and at the same time, for public safety and the protection of privacy, there should be an appropriate level on the easing and tightening of the regulation.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.87-99
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• 2008

High Altitude Platform network systems utilize Unmanned Aerial Vehicle as routers for ground node communication. For this purpose, geographical clustering of ground nodes must be required. In this paper, we assume mobile ground nodes over wide area and the clusters composed of ground nodes are identified. UAVs can be positioned at the point of centroid of clusters. The number of UAVs are derived from the area size and the number of ground nodes deployed in that area. From the simulation and application of clustering algorithms, we showed visual clustering results with dynamic variance of number of ground nodes.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1528-1538
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• 2016

Common data link systems are designed to transmit the imaginary and signal intelligence data at long distance air-ground line of sight(LOS) link. In this paper, we analyze the received power variation according to the communication distance of the common data link using curved earth 2-Ray model suitable for received signal power analysis of long distance air-ground wireless channel. We propose optimal elevation angle control method of the receiving antenna to reduce a power variation caused by ground-reflected wave. Proposed method can get additional link margin compared to the conventional method without any additional hardware performance enhancement.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.38 no.10
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• pp.1031-1037
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• 2010

This paper proposed lightweight aluminum bipolar plates as an alternative for conventional graphite bipolar plates in fuel cell systems used as a power source for small reconnaissance UAVs. Since bipolar plates occupy more than 80% of the total weight of the fuel cell system, lightweight aluminum bipolar plates can improve the overall payload and flight time of the fuel cell UAV. The aluminum and graphite bipolar plates were fabricated to compare the performance of each of them. A 15% higher performance per weight was obtained from aluminum bipolar plates than the graphite bipolar plates. Also, the performance of a single cell using aluminum bipolar plates was evaluated under various operating conditions.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.675-687
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• 2017

In the aerospace industry, we have produced various models according to operational conditions and the environment after development of the base model is completed. Therefore, when design change is necessary, there are modification and updating costs of the circuit whenever environment variables change. For these reasons, recently, in various fields, system designs that can flexibly respond to changing environmental conditions using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are attracting attention, and the rapidly changing aerospace industry also uses FPGAs to organize the system environment. In this paper, we design the controller area network (CAN) intellectual property (IP) protocol used instead of the avionics protocol that includes ARINC-429 and MIL-STD-1553, which are not suitable for small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems at the register transistor logic (RTL) level, which does not depend on the FPGA vender, and we verify the performance. Consequentially, a Spartan 6 FPGA model-based system on chip (SoC) including an embedded system is constructed by using the designed CAN communications IP and Xilinx Microblaze, and the configured SoC only recorded an average 32% logic element usage rate in the Spartan 6 FPGA model.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.201-207
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• 2018

This paper proposes a line laser thermography scanning (LLTS) system for multiple crack evaluation on a concrete structure, as the core technology for unmanned aerial vehicle-mounted crack inspection. The LLTS system consists of a line shape continuous-wave laser source, an infrared (IR) camera, a control computer and a scanning jig. The line laser generates thermal waves on a target concrete structure, and the IR camera simultaneously measures the corresponding thermal responses. By spatially scanning the LLTS system along a target concrete structure, multiple cracks even in a large scale concrete structure can be effectively visualized and evaluated. Since raw IR data obtained by scanning the LLTS system, however, includes timely- and spatially-varying IR images due to the limited field of view (FOV) of the LLTS system, a novel time-spatial-integrated (TSI) coordinate transform algorithm is developed for precise crack evaluation in a static condition. The proposed system has the following technical advantages: (1) the thermal wave propagation is effectively induced on a concrete structure with low thermal conductivity of approximately 0.8 W/m K; (2) the limited FOV issues can be solved by the TSI coordinate transform; and (3) multiple cracks are able to be visualized and evaluated by normalizing the responses based on phase mapping and spatial derivative processes. The proposed LLTS system is experimentally validated using a concrete specimen with various cracks. The experimental results reveal that the LLTS system successfully visualizes and evaluates multiple cracks without false alarms.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.631-641
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• 2020

To meet the urgent requirements of safety surveillance from civil engineering management authorities, this study proposes a refined and efficient approach to generate full-field high-resolution panorama of construction sites using camera-amounted UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). GPS (Global Position System) information extraction for pre-registration, feature points filtering for efficient registration and optimal seaming line seeking for fusion are performed in sequence to form the full-field panorama generation framework. Advantages of the proposed method are as follows. First, GPS information can sort images for pre-registration, avoiding inefficient repeated pairwise calculations and matching. Second, the feature points are filtered according to the characteristics of the construction site images to reduce the amount of calculation. The proposed framework is validated on a road construction site and results demonstrate that it can generate an accurate and high-quality full-site panorama for the safety supervision in a much efficient manner.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.99-111
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• 2016

This paper presents a framework to analyze the change in the research and development (R&D) efficiency of government-funded research institutes (GRIs) in Korea. Cumulative data envelopment analysis/Malmquist index method is utilized to analyze the changes in R&D efficiency of GRIs. Data analysis of the R&D activities of 10 GRIs in Korea Research Council of Fundamental Science & Technology showed that the average R&D efficiency of the 10 GRIs improved from 2009 to 2013. However, the efficiency of a few GRIs decreased in terms of the catch-up index. The proposed framework can help management teams diagnose the current state of R&D activities and determine the efficacy of strategic actions by comparing efficiencies in the past.