Performance evaluation of a multi-rotor unmanned agricultural aircraft system for chemical application

Hang Zhu,Liujun Li,Hongze Li,Lei Tian,Anderson P Adam

doi:10.25165/j.ijabe.20211404.6194

Abstract

Unmanned agricultural aircraft system (UAAS) has been widely employed as a low-cost and reliable method to apply agrochemicals to small agricultural fields in China. The performance of battery-powered multirotor UAAS has attracted considerable attention from manufacturers and researchers. The objective of this research was to design a UAAS equipping with a data acquisition system, to characterize its chemical application performance based on droplet deposition data and optimize the operating parameters. Each test was repeated three times to assess the reliability of the spraying system. Various flight parameters were also evaluated. The optimal spray pressure for the XR8001 and XR8002 (TeeJet, Wheaton, IL, USA) nozzles was found to be 300 kPa, and the latter nozzle had a higher droplet deposition rate and spray volume. Spray volume was not significantly affected by the flight speed or droplet density, and was negatively correlated with the nozzle pressure. The results of this study provide a basis for improving the efficiency of UAAS chemical application systems in terms of large-scale application. Keywords: spray characterization, unmanned agricultural aircraft system, aerial sprayer, onboard data acquisition system, effective swath width, flight parameters, chemical application, performance evaluation DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20211404.6194 Citation: Zhu H, Li H Z, Adam A P, Li L J, Tian L. Performance evaluation of a multi-rotor unmanned agricultural aircraft system for chemical application. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2021; 14(4): 43–52.

Highlights

Current methods for applying agricultural chemicals in China are mostly manual or semi-mechanization[1,2,3]
An interesting phenomenon observed was that droplet volume (DV) appeared minor shift; this may be because the actual pressure was lower than 400 kPa due to a poor seal at the pipe connection point
A unmanned agricultural aircraft systems (UAAS) for chemical spraying based on the DJI S1000 octocopter was built, and a data acquisition system was used to assess the performance of the UAAS under various flight and droplet application conditions

Summary

Introduction

Current methods for applying agricultural chemicals in China are mostly manual or semi-mechanization[1,2,3]. The use of unmanned agricultural aircraft systems (UAAS) for pesticide application has increased in recent decades due to their flexibility and adaptability[4,5,6,7]. To support the development and wide adoption of UAAS for aerial application of agricultural chemicals, analysis and evaluation of their performance under field conditions are required. UAAS for chemical application has been developed; little research has been conducted to characterize their performance and identify ideal operating parameters[8]. Huang et al.[16] developed a fully autonomous UAAS (helicopter) for low-volume application of crop protection products to specific crop areas. Nuyttens et al.[20] established a three-dimensional CFD-based spray drift model, which considered droplet characteristics, meteorological conditions, chemical and crop characteristics, and canopy structure. There have been some researches concerning the procedure of building

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Results

Conclusion