• Title/Summary/Keyword: Light-Weight Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

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Development of an Energy Efficient Tri-Rotor Vertical Take Off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (에너지 효율적 트리로터 수직이착륙 무인항공기 개발)

  • Park, Hee-Jin;Kong, Dong-Uck;Son, Byung-Rak;Lee, Dong-Ha
    • Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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    • v.32 no.spc3
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    • pp.262-268
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    • 2012
  • In the recent research technical solutions have been studied to integrate renewable energy into unmanned aerial vehicles to use it as the main power source. As the weight of the aerial vehicle body is essential for its performance, we consider to use light-weight solar cell technology. Furthermore fuel cells are also integrated create a highly energy-efficient aerial robot. In this paper, construction concept and software design of the tilt-rotor aerial vehicle GAORI is introduced which uses solar cells and fuel cells as power source. The future work direction and prognosis are discussed.

Design of STM32-based Quadrotor UAV Control System

  • Haocong, Cai;Zhigang, Wu;Min, Chen
    • KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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    • v.17 no.2
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    • pp.353-368
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    • 2023
  • The four wing unmanned aerial vehicle owns the characteristics of small size, light weight, convenient operation and well stability. But it is easily disturbed by external environmental factors during flight with these disadvantages of short endurance and poor attitude solving ability. For solving these problems, a microprocessor based on STM32 chip is designed and the overall development is completed by the resources such as built-in timer and multi-function mode general-purpose input/output provided by the master micro controller unit, together with radio receiver, attitude meter, barometer, electronic speed control and other devices. The unmanned aerial vehicle can be remotely controlled and send radio waves to its corresponding receiver, control the analog level change of its corresponding channel pins. The master control chip can analyze and process the data to send multiple sets pulse signals of pulse width modulation to each electronic speed control. Then the electronic speed control will transform different pulse signals into different sizes of current value to drive the motor located in each direction of the frame to generate different rotational speed and generate lift force. To control the body of the unmanned aerial vehicle, so as to achieve the operator's requirements for attitude control, the PID controller based on Kalman filter is used to achieve quick response time and control accuracy. Test results show that the design is feasible.

Optimization study on fuel cell cathode oxygen flow path for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using computational visualization (전산 가시화를 통한 무인 항공기용 연료전지 양극 산소 유로 최적화 연구)

  • Jeon, Ji-A;Lee, Jae-Jun;Song, Young-Su;Kim, Min-Su;Kim, Gun Woo;Na, Youngseung;Rhee, Gwang Hoon
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.85-92
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    • 2019
  • Numerical visualization is conducted to confirm the variation of flow characteristics and pressure drop by the shape of channels on the cathode flow path in hydrogen fuel cells for unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). Generally, a light-weight fan is commonly used rather than a heavy air compressor at UAVS. However, in case of blower fan, a large pressure drop in the flow path causes the blocking of the oxygen supply to the fuel cell. Therefore, the uniformity of flow inside the cathode has to be achieved by changing the shape of the cathode. The flow channel, the duct shape, and the diameter of the fan are changed to optimize the flow path. As a result, it is confirmed that the optimal flow path can decrease the velocity difference between the center and outer flow by 1.8%. However, It should be noted that the channel size can increase the pressure drop.

Evaluation and Fabrication of Composite Bipolar Plate to Develop a Light Weight Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Stack for Small-scale UAV Application (I) (무인항공기용 경량화 직접메탄올연료전지 스택 개발을 위한 복합소재 분리판 제작 및 성능 평가 (I))

  • Kang, Kyung-Mun;Park, Sung-Hyun;Kim, Jin-Soo;Ji, Hyun-Jin;Ju, Hyun-Chul
    • Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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    • v.23 no.2
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    • pp.134-142
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    • 2012
  • A bipolar plate is a major component of a fuel cell stack, which occupies 50~60% of the total weight and over 50% of the total cost of a typical fuel cell stack. In this study, a composite bipolar plate is designed and fabricated to develop a compact and light-weight direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) stack for a small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) application. The composite bipolar plates for DMFCs are prepared by a compression molding method using resole type phenol resin as a binder and natural graphite and carbon black as a conductor filler and tested in terms of electrical conductivity, mechanical strength and hydrogen permeability. The flexural strength of 63 MPa and the in-plane electrical conductivities of 191 S $cm^{-1}$ are achieved under the optimum bipolar plate composition of phenol : 18%; natural graphite : 82%; carbon black : 3%, indicating that the composite bipolar plates exhibit sufficient mechanical strength, electrical conductivity and hydrogen permeability to be applied in a DMFC stack. A DMFC with the composite bipolar plate is tested and shows a similar cell performance with a conventional DMFC with graphite-based bipolar plate.

UAV Autopilot Design under External Disturbances

  • Eun, Youn-Ju;Hyochoong Bang;Tahk, Min-Jea
    • 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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    • 2002.10a
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    • pp.40.3-40
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    • 2002
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) needs autonomous flight capability to accomplish various mission objectives. For this objective, the autopilot is a key element in the UAV system design. The principal goal of autopilot is to guide the aircraft under varying external disturbances throughout the mission phases. The external disturbances include gravity effect, wind gust, and other unexpected obstacles. The gust affects the aircraft flight performance to a significant extent. UAV's low speed, light weight, and the absence of human judgment makes un predictable gust more dangerous. Autopilot design in general takes the gust effect into account to satisfy flight performance requirement. In this study..

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Real-time Stabilization Method for Video acquired by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (무인 항공기 촬영 동영상을 위한 실시간 안정화 기법)

  • Cho, Hyun-Tae;Bae, Hyo-Chul;Kim, Min-Uk;Yoon, Kyoungro
    • Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.27-33
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    • 2014
  • Video from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is influenced by natural environments due to the light-weight UAV, specifically by winds. Thus UAV's shaking movements make the video shaking. Objective of this paper is making a stabilized video by removing shakiness of video acquired by UAV. Stabilizer estimates camera's motion from calculation of optical flow between two successive frames. Estimated camera's movements have intended movements as well as unintended movements of shaking. Unintended movements are eliminated by smoothing process. Experimental results showed that our proposed method performs almost as good as the other off-line based stabilizer. However estimation of camera's movements, i.e., calculation of optical flow, becomes a bottleneck to the real-time stabilization. To solve this problem, we make parallel stabilizer making average 30 frames per second of stabilized video. Our proposed method can be used for the video acquired by UAV and also for the shaking video from non-professional users. The proposed method can also be used in any other fields which require object tracking, or accurate image analysis/representation.

A Study on Ku-band Antenna for Mounting on UAV (무인 항공기 탑재용 Ku대역 안테나에 관한 연구)

  • Park, Jin-Woo;Ryu, Ji-Ho
    • Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.50-56
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    • 2014
  • In this paper, we proposed a Ku-band antenna that can be mounted on UAV. A proposed antenna structure has small size and light weight. It is considered long distance communication environment(LOS) and equipped UAV. Proposed antenna is designed $16{\times}2$ aperture coupled microstrip patch array antenna for high gain characteristics. In the measurement results, VSWR is less than 1.5 and the gain is over 21dBi in the bandwidth. Mechanical specifications of antenna assembly are ${\phi}250{\times}200mm$ of size and 3kg of weight.

A Numerical Study on Aerodynamic Characteristics of Bumpy Airfoil in a Low Reynolds Number Flows (저 레이놀즈수 유동에서 Bumpy Airfoil의 공력 특성 연구)

  • Go, Geon;Lee, Su-Ho;Kim, Hui-Jae;Lee, Do-Hyeong
    • Proceeding of EDISON Challenge
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    • 2014.03a
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    • pp.521-526
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    • 2014
  • 현대에 이르러 초경량 무인 비행기에 대한 많은 연구가 진행되고 있다. 이러한 비행체는 저레이놀즈수 영역에서 사용되는 특성으로 인해, 경계층 내에서 박리현상과 난류영역으로의 천이 등과 같은 여러 복합적인 현상을 발생시킴으로써 비행체의 공력특성에 큰 영향을 미친다. Bumpy Airfoil은 저레이놀즈수 유동에서의 이와 같은 문제를 해결하기 위해 제안된 익형이다. 따라서 본 논문은 전산열유체해석 프로그램인 EDISON_전산열유체를 이용하여 Bumpy Airfoil 형상에 대한 공력특성을 연구하였고, 발생하는 양항비를 원 익형과 비교하였다. 비압축성 조건 내에서, 공력 성능 향상을 위한 Bumpy Airfoil의 형상 변수로 Bump 개수와 높이를 선정하여 받음각에 따른 유동장을 분석하고 양항비를 수치해석 및 고찰하였다.

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Aerodynamic Design of the Solar-Powered High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

  • Hwang, Seung-Jae;Kim, Sang-Gon;Kim, Cheol-Won;Lee, Yung-Gyo
    • International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.132-138
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    • 2016
  • Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) is developing an electric-driven HALE UAV in order to secure system and operational technologies since 2010. Based on the flight tests and design experiences of the previously developed electric-driven UAVs, KARI has designed EAV-3, a solar-powered HALE UAV. EAV-3 weighs 53kg, the structure weight is 22kg, and features a flexible wing of 19.5m in span with the aspect ratio of 17.4. Designing the main wing and empennage of the EAV-3 the amount of the bending due to the flexible wing, 404mm at 1-G flight condition based on T-800 composite material, and side wind effects due to low cruise speed, $V_{cr}=6m/sec$, are carefully considered. Also, unlike the general aircraft there is no center of gravity shift during the flight because of the EAV-3 is the solar-electric driven UAV. Thus, static margin cuts down to 28.4% and center of gravity moves back to 31% of the Mean Aerodynamic Chord (MAC) comparing with the previously designed the EAV-2 and EAV-2H/2H+ to upgrade the flight performance of the EAV-3.

Real-time comprehensive image processing system for detecting concrete bridges crack

  • Lin, Weiguo;Sun, Yichao;Yang, Qiaoning;Lin, Yaru
    • Computers and Concrete
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    • v.23 no.6
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    • pp.445-457
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    • 2019
  • Cracks are an important distress of concrete bridges, and may reduce the life and safety of bridges. However, the traditional manual crack detection means highly depend on the experience of inspectors. Furthermore, it is time-consuming, expensive, and often unsafe when inaccessible position of bridge is to be assessed, such as viaduct pier. To solve this question, the real-time automatic crack detecting system with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) become a choice. This paper designs a new automatic detection system based on real-time comprehensive image processing for bridge crack. It has small size, light weight, low power consumption and can be carried on a small UAV for real-time data acquisition and processing. The real-time comprehensive image processing algorithm used in this detection system combines the advantage of connected domain area, shape extremum, morphology and support vector data description (SVDD). The performance and validity of the proposed algorithm and system are verified. Compared with other detection method, the proposed system can effectively detect cracks with high detection accuracy and high speed. The designed system in this paper is suitable for practical engineering applications.