Pattern recognition of UAV flight data based on semi-supervised clustering

Abstract

UAV is an unmanned aerial vehicle controlled by a remote radio signal or a trajectory planning software carried itself. It is widely used in military, civil and scientific research fields. However, due to the lack of real-time decision-making ability, the UAV has high fault rate. The flight quality assessment of UAV and the construction of fault prediction model can be used for debugging and fault-removing to customer’s aircraft, and also to increase the added value of the civilian UAV products. Before building a fault prediction model, a very important step is to identify the pattern of sampled data. For each group of flight data, the efficiency and accuracy rate of manual quality evaluation and fault identification are not acceptable. Based on the UAV flight data accumulated in the big data platform of an UAV production company in Shenyang, Liaoning Province of China, this paper proposes a semi-supervised clustering technique to do automatic pattern recognition for the sampling points. According to the characteristics of UAV flight data, two different methods are designed to choose initial centroids. Meanwhile, we use the existing normal flight data to train distance thresholds to combine some clusters to eliminate the resulting error clustering. Real flight data or flight test data with manually added labels are used to run the proposed algorithms to verify the recognition results. The experimental results show that the proposed methods greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of adding precise labels to the historical flight data and play a role in assisting the manual recognition of sampling points while strengthening the management and statistics.