• Journal of Drive and Control
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.25-34
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• 2023

In this study, we conducted a research on optimizing the spraying performance of agricultural drones and predicted the spraying performance in various flight conditions using the multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Data was collected using a test device for pesticide spraying performance according to the water sensitive paper (WSP) evaluation. MLP training involved supervised learning to achieve a coefficient of variation (CV), which indicates the degree of uniform spraying. The performance evaluation was conducted using R-squared (R²), the test samples showed an R² of 0.80. The results of this study showed that drone spraying performance can be predicted under various flight environments. In addition, the correlation analysis between flight conditions and predicted spraying performance will be useful for further research on optimizing the spraying performance of agricultural drones.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.38-45
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• 2019

When there is a spray flow such as from a pesticide nozzle, winds affect the droplet flow of a rotary-wing drone accompanied by a strong wake, with a severe oscillation. Especially, during forwarding flights or when winds come from the side, compare to a simple hovering flight as the droplet is in the effect of aerodynamic drag force, the effect of spraying region becomes even larger. For this reason, the spraying of pesticides using drones may cause a greater risk of scattering or a difference in droplet dispersion between locations, resulting in a decrease in efficiency. Therefore, through proper numerical modeling and its applied simulation, an indication tool is required applicable for the various flight and atmospheric conditions. In this research, we completed both experiment and numerical analysis for the strong downwash from the rotor and flight velocity of the drone by comparing the probability density function of droplet distribution to build a spraying system that can improve the efficiency when spraying droplets in the pesticide spray drone.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.427-435
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• 2023

This study was conducted to evaluate the spraying performance according to the flight conditions of agricultural drones for the development of a variable control system. The analyzed flight conditions comprised six factors: spraying direction, flight speed, altitude, wind speed, wind direction, and rotor rotational speed. The ratio of the area sprayed on the water-sensitive paper was used as the coverage, and the distribution and amount of the coverage were evaluated. The coverage distribution based on the distance from the drone was used to evaluate a spray pattern, and the distribution was expressed as a Gaussian function approximation. In addition, the probability distribution based on coverage was expressed as the cumulative probability via Gamma function approximation to analyze the spraying efficiency in the target area. The results showed that the averaged coverage decreased significantly as the flight speed and wind speed increased, and the wind direction changed the spray pattern without a coverage decrease. This study contributes to the development of a control technique for the precision control system of agricultural drones.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.575-580
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• 2023

This study was prevent the decrease in crop output by insect pests and spraying by application uniformity. A flight level 4 m height and 4-5 m/sec. speed are difficult to maintain with a agricultural drone for aerial application, which has been affected by the methods or environmental factors, such as changes in the wind. Therefore, which can allow a controlled application width and spray rate automatically and verified experimentally using drone. The sprayed particles began to decrease from about 3.75 m on the left and right sides of the spray nozzle. According to the number of particles, the effective spraying width was observed to be about 7.5 m, and it was verified that the proposed spraying system was effective in uniform control system.

• Journal of Drive and Control
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.53-64
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• 2024

Global population growth has resulted in an increased demand for food production. Simultaneously, aging rural communities have led to a decrease in the workforce, thereby increasing the demand for automation in agriculture. Drones are particularly useful for unmanned pest control fields. However, the current method of uniform spraying leads to environmental damage due to overuse of pesticides and drift by wind. To address this issue, it is necessary to enhance spraying performance through precise performance evaluation. Therefore, as a foundational study aimed at optimizing drone-based pest control technologies, this research evaluated water-sensitive paper (WSP) via density map estimation using convolutional neural networks (CNN) with a encoder-decoder structure. To achieve more accurate estimation, this study implemented multi-task learning, incorporating an additional classifier for image segmentation alongside the density map estimation classifier. The proposed model in this study resulted in a R-squared (R²) of 0.976 for coverage area in the evaluation data set, demonstrating satisfactory performance in evaluating WSP at various density levels. Further research is needed to improve the accuracy of spray result estimations and develop a real-time assessment technology in the field.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.149-157
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• 2020

Regarding previously-developed drone simulators, it was easy to check their flight stability or controlling functions based on the condition that their weight was fixed from the design. However, the drone is largely classified into two types that is the one with the fixed weight whose purpose is recording video with camera and racing and another is whole weight-variable during flight with loading the articles for delivery and spraying pesticide though the weight of airframe is fixed. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the structure of drone and its flight principle, suggest dynamics-model-based simulator that is capable of simulating weight-variable drone and develop the simulator that can be used for designing main control board, motor and transmission along the application of weight-variable drone. Weight-variable simulator was developed by using various calculation to apply flying method of drone to the simulator. First, ground coordinate system and airframe-fixing coordinate system were established and switching matrix of those two coordinates were made. Then, dynamics model of drone was established using the law of Newton and moment balance principle. Dynamics model was established in Simulink platform and simulation experiment was carried out by changing the weight of drone. In order to evaluate the validity of developed weight-variable simulator, it was compared to the results of clean flight public simulator against existing weight-fixed drone. Lastly, simulation test was performed with the developed weight-variable simulation by changing the weight of drone. It was found out that dynamics model controlled various flying positions of drone well from simulation and the possibility of securing the optimum condition of weight-variable drone that has flying stability and easiness of controlling.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.27-33
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• 2023

Recently, water shortages have occurred due to climate change, and the need for water management of agricultural water has increased due to the occurrence of algal blooms in reservoirs. Existing algae prevention is operated by putting many people on site and misses the optimal spraying time due to movement through boats. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to block contamination in advance and move within time to uniformly spray complex microorganisms uniformly. Control drones are used for pesticide spraying and can be applied to algae prevention work by utilizing control drones. In this paper, basic research for the establishment of a marine control system was conducted for application to the reservoir environment, and as one of the results, the characteristics of a drone nozzle, a core technology that can be used for control drones, were calculated. In particular, it was found that the existing agricultural control drones had a disadvantage that the concentration was non-uniform within the suggested spraying interval, and to compensate for this, nozzle positioning and nozzle spraying uniformity were calculated. Based on the experimental results, we develop a core algorithm for establishing an algal bloom monitoring system in the reservoir environment and propose a precision control technology that can be used for marine control work in the future.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.10 no.10
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• pp.135-142
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• 2020

In the recent farming industry, there is a growing diffusion of drones, which are recognized as a crucial technology of the 4 th industrial revolution to cope with aging. Especially, filming and pest control using drones are representative fields that have different age groups for obtaining a national license of multicopter that is a ultra-light flying device, and can create profits after getting a license. However, pest control technology using drones has different spray effects depending on levels of operational proficiency, since this highly relies on an operator's operating skills. It is anticipated that if this issue is supplemented, the use of drones for pest control in the farming industry will diversify. For analysis of spraying characteristics of agricultural pest control drones, this study aims to formulate effective spraying hours and effective spraying intervals and suggest an algorithm, which facilitates an accurate calculation of pest control area depending on the kinds of pest control drones. This algorithm can be used in the field of pest control by improving scatterling issues caused by drone flight methods of drone pest controllers and building an optimum pest control manual in future.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.176-186
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• 2020

The size and shape of crops are diverse, and the growing environment is also different. Therefore, when one uses a drone to spray pesticides, the characteristics of each crop must be considered, and flight conditions such as the flight height and forwarding velocity of the drone should be changed. The droplet flow of pesticides is affected by various flight conditions, and a large change occurs in the sprayed area. As a result, an uneven distribution of liquid may be formed at the wake, and the transport efficiency will be decreased as well as there would be a risk of toxic scatter. Therefore, this paper analyzes the degree of distribution of pesticides to the crops through numerical analysis when pesticide is sprayed onto the selected three crops with different characteristics by using agricultural drones with different flight conditions. On the purpose of establishing a guideline for spraying pesticides using a drone in accordance with the characteristics of crops, this paper compares the amount of pesticides distributed in the crops at the wake of nozzle flow using the figure of merit, and the sum of transported liquid rate divided by the root mean square of the probability density function.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.531-536
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• 2024

Control drones, which are recently classified as smart agricultural machines in the agricultural field, are striving to build smart control and automatic control systems by combining hardware and software in order to shorten working hours and increase the effectiveness of control in the aging era of rural areas. In this paper, the characteristics of the nozzle dedicated to the control drone were analyzed as a basic study for the establishment of management control and automatic control systems. In order to consider various variables such as the type of various drone models, controller, wind, flight speed, flight altitude, weather conditions, and UAV pesticide types, related studies are needed to be able to present the drug spraying criteria in consideration of the characteristics and versatility of the nozzle. Therefore, to enable the consideration of various variables, flow analysis (CFD) simulation was conducted based on the self-designed nozzle, and the theoretical and experimental values of the droplet distribution were compared and analyzed through water reduction experiments. In the future, we intend to calculate accurate scattering in consideration of various variables according to drone operation and use it in management control and automatic control systems.