• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.669-681
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• 2019

Bridge collapses may deliver a huge impact on our society in a very negative way. Out of many reasons why bridges collapse, poor maintenance is becoming a main contributing factor to many recent collapses. Furthermore, the aging of bridges is able to make the situation much worse. In order to prevent this unwanted event, it is indispensable to conduct continuous bridge monitoring and timely maintenance. Visual inspection is the most widely used method, but it is heavily dependent on the experience of the inspectors. It is also time-consuming, labor-intensive, costly, disruptive, and even unsafe for the inspectors. In order to address its limitations, in recent years increasing interests have been paid to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is expected to make the inspection process safer, faster and more cost-effective. In addition, it can cover the area where it is too hard to reach by inspectors. However, this strategy is still in a primitive stage because there are many things to be addressed for real implementation. In this paper, a typical procedure of bridge inspection using UAVs consisting of three phases (i.e., pre-inspection, inspection, and post-inspection phases) and the detailed tasks by phase are described. Also, three major challenges, which are related to a UAV's flight, image data acquisition, and damage identification, respectively, are identified from a practical perspective (e.g., localization of a UAV under the bridge, high-quality image capture, etc.) and their possible solutions are discussed by examining recently developed or currently developing techniques such as the graph-based localization algorithm, and the image quality assessment and enhancement strategy. In particular, deep learning based algorithms such as R-CNN and Mask R-CNN for classifying, localizing and quantifying several damage types (e.g., cracks, corrosion, spalling, efflorescence, etc.) in an automatic manner are discussed. This strategy is based on a huge amount of image data obtained from unmanned inspection equipment consisting of the UAV and imaging devices (vision and IR cameras).

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2008.03a
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• pp.84-88
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• 2008

The UAV propulsion system that will be operated for long time at more than 40,000ft altitude should have not only fuel flow minimization but also high reliability and durability. If this UAV propulsion system may have faults, it is not easy to recover the system from the abnormal, and hence an accurate diagnostic technology must be needed to keep the operational reliability. For this purpose, the development of the health monitoring system which can monitor remotely the engine condition should be required. In this study, a fuzzy trend monitoring method for detecting the engine faults including mechanical faults was proposed through analyzing performance trends of measurement data. The trend monitoring is an engine conditioning method which can find engine faults by monitoring important measuring parameters such as fuel flow, exhaust gas temperatures, rotational speeds, vibration and etc. Using engine condition database as an input to be generated by linear regression analysis of real engine instrument data, an application of the fuzzy logic in diagnostics estimated the cause of fault in each component. According to study results, it was confirmed that the proposed trend monitoring method can improve reliability and durability of the propulsion system for a long endurance UAV to be operated at medium altitude.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.148-159
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• 2018

Purpose: Unmanned air vehicle (UAV) remote sensing was applied to test various vegetation indices and make prediction models of protein content of rice for monitoring grain quality and proper management practice. Methods: Image acquisition was carried out by using NIR (Green, Red, NIR), RGB and RE (Blue, Green, Red-edge) camera mounted on UAV. Sampling was done synchronously at the geo-referenced points and GPS locations were recorded. Paddy samples were air-dried to 15% moisture content, and then dehulled and milled to 92% milling yield and measured the protein content by near-infrared spectroscopy. Results: Artificial neural network showed the better performance with $R^2$ (coefficient of determination) of 0.740, NSE (Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient) of 0.733 and RMSE (root mean square error) of 0.187% considering all 54 samples than the models developed by PR (polynomial regression), SLR (simple linear regression), and PLSR (partial least square regression). PLSR calibration models showed almost similar result with PR as 0.663 ($R^2$) and 0.169% (RMSE) for cloud-free samples and 0.491 ($R^2$) and 0.217% (RMSE) for cloud-shadowed samples. However, the validation models performed poorly. This study revealed that there is a highly significant correlation between NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) and protein content in rice. For the cloud-free samples, the SLR models showed $R^2=0.553$ and RMSE = 0.210%, and for cloud-shadowed samples showed 0.479 as $R^2$ and 0.225% as RMSE respectively. Conclusion: There is a significant correlation between spectral bands and grain protein content. Artificial neural networks have the strong advantages to fit the nonlinear problem when a sigmoid activation function is used in the hidden layer. Quantitatively, the neural network model obtained a higher precision result with a mean absolute relative error (MARE) of 2.18% and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.187%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.12
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• pp.1846-1854
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• 2022

The sophistication and diversification of mission equipment for surveillance and reconnaissance is leading to a demand for large-capacity public data links. Overseas, a T4 class(274Mbps) common data link was applied to the Global hwak, a high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle, and various research and development are being conducted in Korea. In this paper, we propose a structure in which pilot is additionally applied to improve SNR performance while minimizing data transmission rate loss in the DVB-S2 frame structure, which is a european satellite broadcasting standard, for high-capacity transmission of T4 class or higher in the common data link. For the performance evaluation of the proposed structure, the performance of the DVB-S2 was compared and analyzed by simulating the UAV data link channel environment. As a result of simulation, 0.15% of transmission rate loss occurred at T4 class transmission rate compared to DVB-S2 in the proposed structure, but improved SNR reception performance of 0.2~0.3dB was confirmed in the UAV channel environment.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.430-435
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• 2014

This paper presents the case study of the airworthiness certification for the flight control system of tactical UAV. Airworthiness regulations for flight characteristics and design and construction based on the STANAG 4671 are selected, and safety assessment is performed. Stall protection on wing level and turning flight criteria, and flap interconnection system failures were analyzed and applied to the flight control system design. The Hardware-in-the-loop simulation including math model, integrated system verification and validation test and failure mode and effects test were also performed and they are used to validate the means of compliance of the proposed airworthiness.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.353-362
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• 2024

This study examined the spectral characteristics of sediments according to moisture content using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based hyperspectral sensor and evaluated the efficiency of moisture content detection at different flight altitudes. For this purpose, hyperspectral images in the 400-1000nm wavelength range were acquired and analyzed at altitudes of 40m and 80m for sediment samples with various moisture contents. The reflectance of the sediments generally showed a decreasing trend as the moisture content increased. Correlation analysis between moisture content and reflectance showed a strong negative correlation (r < -0.8) across the entire 400-900nm range. The moisture content detection model constructed using the Random Forest technique showed detection accuracies of RMSE 2.6%, R² 0.92 at 40m altitude and RMSE 2.2%, R² 0.95 at 80m altitude, confirming that the difference in accuracy between altitudes was minimal. Variable importance analysis revealed that the 600-700nm band played a crucial role in moisture content detection. This study is expected to be utilized in efficient sediment moisture management and natural disaster prediction in the field of environmental monitoring in the future.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.423-431
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• 2016

In this study, wing design optimization for long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is investigated. The fluid-structure integration (FSI) analysis is carried out to simulate the aeroelastic characteristics of a high-aspect ratio wing for a long-endurance UAV. High-fidelity computational codes, FLUENT and DIAMOND/IPSAP, are employed for the loose coupling FSI optimization. In addition, this optimization procedure is improved by adopting the design of experiment (DOE) and Kriging model. A design optimization tool, PIAnO, integrates with an in-house codes, CAE simulation and an optimization process for generating the wing geometry/computational mesh, transferring information, and finding the optimum solution. The goal of this optimization is to find the best high-aspect ratio wing shape that generates minimum drag at a cruise condition of $C_L=1.0$. The result shows that the optimal wing shape produced 5.95 % less drag compared to the initial wing shape.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2017

Rice plant numbers and density are key factors for yield and quality of rice grains. Precise and properly estimated rice plant numbers and density can assure high yield from rice fields. The main objective of this study was to automatically detect and count rice plants using images of usual field condition from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We proposed an automatic image processing method based on morphological operation and boundaries of the connected component to count rice plant numbers after transplanting. We converted RGB images to binary images and applied adaptive median filter to remove distortion and noises. Then we applied a morphological operation to the binary image and draw boundaries to the connected component to count rice plants using those images. The result reveals the algorithm can conduct a performance of 89% by the F-measure, corresponding to a Precision of 87% and a Recall of 91%. The best fit image gives a performance of 93% by the F-measure, corresponding to a Precision of 91% and a Recall of 96%. Comparison between the numbers of rice plants detected and counted by the naked eye and the numbers of rice plants found by the proposed method provided viable and acceptable results. The $R^2$ value was approximately 0.893.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2004.03a
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• pp.499-505
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• 2004

A Propulsion System of the CRW(Canard Rotor Wing) type UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) was composed of the turbojet engine to generate the propulsive exhaust gas, and the duct system including straight bent ducts, tip-jet nozzles, a master valve and a variable main nozzle for three flight modes such as lift/landing mode, low speed transition flight mode and high speed forward flight mode. In this study, in order to operate safely the propulsion system, the dynamic Performance behavior of the system was modeled and simulated using the SIMULIN $K^{ }$, which is the user-friendly GUI type dynamic analysis tool provided by MATLA $B^{ }$. In the transient performance model, the inter-component volume model was used. The performance analysis using the developed models was performed at various flight condition, valve angle positions and fuel flow schedules, and these results could set the safe flight mode transition region to satisfy the inlet temperature overshoot limitation as well as the compressor surge margin. Performance analysis results using the SIMULIN $K^{ }$ performance program were compared with them using the commercial program GSP.m GSP.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.351-360
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• 2020

Monitoring civil structures periodically is necessary for ensuring the fitness of the structures. Cracks on inner and outer surfaces of the building plays a vital role in indicating the health of the building. Conventionally, human visual inspection techniques were carried up to human reachable altitudes. Monitoring of high rise infrastructures cannot be done using this primitive method. Also, there is a necessity for more accurate prediction of cracks on building surfaces for ensuring the health and safety of the building. The proposed research focused on developing an efficient crack classification model using Transfer Learning enabled EfficientNet (TL-EN) architecture. Though many other pre-trained models were available for crack classification, they rely on more number of training parameters for better accuracy. The TL-EN model attained an accuracy of 0.99 with less number of parameters on large dataset. A bench marked METU dataset with 40000 images were used to test and validate the proposed model. The surfaces of high rise buildings were investigated using vision enabled Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAV). These UAV is fabricated with TL-EN model schema for capturing and analyzing the real time streaming video of building surfaces.