• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2017.04a
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• pp.45-45
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• 2017

On-site monitoring of vegetable growth parameters, such as leaf length, leaf area, and fresh weight, in an agricultural field can provide useful information for farmers to establish farm management strategies suitable for optimum production of vegetables. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently gaining a growing interest for agricultural applications. This study reports on validation testing of previously developed vegetable growth estimation models based on UAV-based RGB images for white radish and Chinese cabbage. Specific objective was to investigate the potential of the UAV-based RGB camera system for effectively quantifying temporal and spatial variability in the growth status of white radish and Chinese cabbage in a field. RGB images were acquired based on an automated flight mission with a multi-rotor UAV equipped with a low-cost RGB camera while automatically tracking on a predefined path. The acquired images were initially geo-located based on the log data of flight information saved into the UAV, and then mosaicked using a commerical image processing software. Otsu threshold-based crop coverage and DSM-based crop height were used as two predictor variables of the previously developed multiple linear regression models to estimate growth parameters of vegetables. The predictive capabilities of the UAV sensing system for estimating the growth parameters of the two vegetables were evaluated quantitatively by comparing to ground truth data. There were highly linear relationships between the actual and estimated leaf lengths, widths, and fresh weights, showing coefficients of determination up to 0.7. However, there were differences in slope between the ground truth and estimated values lower than 0.5, thereby requiring the use of a site-specific normalization method.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.599-608
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• 2017

Cracks on the asphalt road surface can affect the speed of the car, the consumption of fuel, the ride quality of the road, and the durability of the road surface. Such cracks in roads can lead to very dangerous consequences for long periods of time. To prevent such risks, it is necessary to identify cracks and take appropriate action. It takes too much time and money to do it. Also, it is difficult to use expensive laser equipment vehicles for initial cost and equipment operation. In this paper, we propose an effective detection method of road surface defect using ROI (Region of Interest) setting and cany edge detection method using UAV image. The results of this study can be presented as efficient method for road surface flaw detection and maintenance using UAV. In addition, it can be used to detect cracks such as various buildings and civil engineering structures such as buildings, outer walls, large-scale storage tanks other than roads, and cost reduction effect can be expected.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.306-317
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• 2017

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) became popular platforms for the collection of remotely sensed data in the last years. This study deals with the monitoring of multi-temporal onion growth with very high resolution by means of low-cost equipment. The concept of the monitoring was estimation of multi-temporal onion growth using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and meteorological factors. For this study, UAV imagery was taken on the Changnyeong, Hapcheon and Muan regions eight times from early February to late June during the onion growing season. In precision agriculture frequent remote sensing on such scales during the vegetation period provided important spatial information on the crop status. Meanwhile, four plant growth parameters, plant height (P.H.), leaf number (L.N.), plant diameter (P.D.) and fresh weight (F.W.) were measured for about three hundred plants (twenty plants per plot) for each field campaign. Three meteorological factors included average temperature, rainfall and irradiation over an entire onion growth period. The multiple linear regression models were suggested by using stepwise regression in the extraction of independent variables. As a result, $NDVI_{UAV}$ and rainfall in the model explain 88% and 68% of the P.H. and F.W. with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 7.29 cm and 59.47 g, respectively. And $NDVI_{UAV}$ in the model explain 43% of the L.N. with a RMSE of 0.96. These lead to the result that the characteristics of variations in onion growth according to $NDVI_{UAV}$ and other meteorological factors were well reflected in the model.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.393-407
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• 2020

In order to reduce the threat by illegal unmanned aerial vehicles, a tracking system based on sound was implemented. There are three main points to the drone acoustic tracking method. First, it scans the space through variable beam formation to find a sound source and records the sound using a microphone array. Second, it classifies it into a hidden Markov model (HMM) to find out whether the sound source exists or not, and finally, the sound source is In the case of a drone, a sound source recorded and stored as a tracking reference signal based on an adaptive beam pattern is used. The simulation was performed in both the ideal condition without background noise and interference sound and the non-ideal condition with background noise and interference sound, and evaluated the tracking performance of illegal drones. The drone tracking system designed the criteria for determining the presence or absence of a drone according to the improvement of the search distance performance according to the microphone array performance and the degree of sound pattern matching, and reflected in the design of the speech reading circuit.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.29-39
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• 2015

When new inertial navigation systems for an unmanned aerial vehicles are being developed and tested, construction of a fault-tolerant system is required because of various types of hazards caused by S/W and H/W faults. In this paper, a new fault-tolerant flight system that can be deployed into one or more FCCs (Flight Control Computers) is introduced, based on a partition scheme wherein each OFP (Operational Flight Program) partition uses an independent CPU and memory slot. The new fault-tolerant navigation system utilizes one or two FCCs, and executes a primary navigation OFP under development and a stable shadow OFP partition on each node. The fault-tolerant navigation system based on a single FCC can be used for UAVs with small payloads. For larger UAVs, an additional FCC with two OFP partitions can be used to provide both H/W and S/W fault-tolerance. The developed fault-tolerant navigation system significantly removes various hazards in testing new navigation S/Ws for UAVs.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.2371-2379
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• 2017

For the drone that is active in a wide search area, the time to grasp the target in the field of applications such as searching for emergency patients, monitoring of natural disasters requiring prompt warning and response, that is, the speediness of target detection is very important. In the actual operation of drone, the time for target detection is highly related to collaboration between drones and search algorithm to efficiently search the navigation area. In this research, we will provide a search method with cooperation of drone based on target existence probability to solve the problem of quickness in drone target search. In particular, the proposed method increases the probability of finding a target and shorten the search time by transmitting high-altitude drone search results to a low-altitude drone after searching first and performing more precise search. We verify the performance of the proposed method through several simulations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.142-149
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• 2013

The thrust vector control technique is essential for high maneuverability of unmanned aerial vehicles. In the present study, a multi-component balance was developed to quantitatively evaluate the thrust-vectoring performance of a supersonic rectangular nozzle based on the Coanda coflowing effect. Precise calibration and detailed data analysis were performed during the development. It was found that the cross-talk errors between load cells in the balance were less than 5%, and that the unwanted errors due to high-pressure supply tubes were almost negligible, which contributed to the high accuracy of the present balance design. Some preliminary test results of the thrust-vectoring performance of the present nozzle design were also obtained and analyzed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.711-723
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• 2017

This paper proposes a flight control system for an organic flight array(OFA) which has a new configuration to consist of multi modularized ducted-fan unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The OFA is able to apply to various missions such as indoor reconnaissance, communication relay, and radar jamming by using capability of hover flight. The OFA has a distinguished advantage due to reconfigurable structure to assemble or separate with respect to its missions or operational conditions. A dynamic modelling of the OFA is derived based on equations of motion of the single ducted-fan modules. In order to apply nonlinear control method, an affine system of attitude dynamics is derived. Moreover, the control system is composed of a back-stepping controller for attitude control and a PID controller for position control. Then the performance of the proposed controller is verified via a numerical simulation under wind disturbance.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.443-449
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• 2017

Swarm of low-cost UAVs for search mission has benefit in the sense of rapid search compared to use of single high-end UAV. As the number of UAVs forming swarm increases, not only the time for the mission planning increases, but also the system to operate UAVs has excessive burden. This paper addresses a decentralized area search algorithm adequate for multiple UAVs which takes advantages of flexibility, robustness, and simplicity. To down the cost, it is assumed that each UAV has limited ability: close-communication, basic calculation, and limited memory. In close-communication, heath conditions and search information are shared. And collision avoidance and consensus of next search direction are then done. To increase weight on un-searched area and to provide overlapped search, the score function is introduced. Performance and operational characteristics of the proposed search algorithm and mission planning logic are verified via numerical simulations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.478-487
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• 2014

The simplified performance analysis and initial configuration design are required for the successful development of UAV during the conceptual design, in which empirical formulas and trend equations are utilized for the UAV performance analysis. In the conceptual design phase various UAV configurations may be considered, however, it is very inefficient and unnecessary to consider all configurations for the conceptual design. In this study, the database for the fixed wing UAVs whose MTOW is between 50kg and 1,500kg was also constructed for the selection of configuration frequently used. The parametric analyses were performed for major performance parameters, and trend equations were developed through regression analyses for these individual performance parameters.