Abstract
With the steady progress of China’s agricultural modernization, the demand for agricultural machinery for production is widely growing. Agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming a new force in the field of precision agricultural aviation in China. In those agricultural areas where ground-based machinery have difficulties in executing farming operations, agricultural UAVs have shown obvious advantages. With the development of precision agricultural aviation technology, one of the inevitable trends is to realize autonomous identification of obstacles and real-time obstacle avoidance (OA) for agricultural UAVs. However, the complex farmland environment and changing obstacles both increase the complexity of OA research. The objective of this paper is to introduce the development of agricultural UAV OA technology in China. It classifies the farmland obstacles in two ways and puts forward the OA zones and related avoidance tactics, which helps to improve the safety of aviation operations. This paper presents a comparative analysis of domestic applications of agricultural UAV OA technology, features, hotspot and future research directions. The agricultural UAV OA technology of China is still at an early development stage and many barriers still need to be overcome.
Highlights
China’s No.1 Central Document has focused on agriculture, rural area and famer issues for 14 consecutive years since 2004
The results showed that as of 30 June 2016, the number of field-operated plant-protection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the country was 4262, of which, electric multi-rotor agricultural UAVs were the mainstay
We should note that: (a) the lack of definition or division of farmland obstacles; (b) the absence of technical performance indicators of OA system, such as response time, OA speed, etc.; (c) no unified and specific OA action decomposition and specification with only seemingly concrete but vague instructions such as hovering alarms, autonomous bypass, and emergency landing, all cannot meet the future requirements of independent spraying, real-time obstacle avoidance, continuous operation and cooperative work [16,17] of agricultural UAVs
Summary
Intelligent UAVs as mentioned in the Action Plan will support intelligent obstacle avoidance, automatic cruise, autonomous flight for complex environments, group engagements, and R&D of other key technologies and applications to promote new-generation communications, positioning, and navigation technology in UAV data transmission, link control, monitoring, and management applications, develop intelligent flight control systems, highly integrated specialized chips, and other key components. In August 2018, the Guangdong Provincial People’s Government stated in the notice on the issuance of New Generation AI Development Plan of Guangdong Province that it will build AI open innovation platforms, promote “Internet Plus” smart agriculture and strengthen R&D and industrialization of agriculture UAVs [11]. The ideal OA system can automatically and promptly avoid all kinds of obstacles in the flight path, preventing accidents caused by operational errors, autonomous flight failures or other unexpected failures, and effectively reducing unnecessary loss of property and casualties
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