Resolution improvement of accelerometers measurement for drones in agricultural applications

Abstract

In agricultural tasks, monitoring of large fields is required. In the last years automatic/autonomous monitoring has been researched; where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)—commonly known as drones—are used. For these systems, constrains related with autonomy during flight arise. In order to control properly the UAVs during flight, they require to measure physical variables, in a fast and accurate way. Also, the weight of instruments must be reduced for improving autonomy. In general, aerial vehicles obtain parameters like position, velocity and acceleration using inertial navigation systems. Regarding to this concern, in this work application of a novel technique for measurements onboard UAVs—particularly inertial measurement unit or IMU—is proposed. There are accelerometers inside the IMU. These accelerometers have a frequency domain output. The speed and position are calculated by the INS from acceleration. The acceleration is obtained from frequency measurements of the accelerometers output. For this reason an accurate and fast frequency measurement method is required. In this work, for this particular application, frequency measurement using principle of rational approximations is proposed. This technique allows to measure frequency in short time and with high accuracy, using a few electronic components. Due this properties, it perfectly fits requirements for UAVs.