ERAU's Hub (Virtual UAS Assembly and Flight)

Hello Fellow Aces,

This week I had the opportunity to explore Embry Riddle's Virtual UAS Assembly and Flight Lab - The Hub. Overall, I think the tool is pretty useful for introductory level exposure to several different types of UAV airframes and payloads. My main focus during the experience was taking note of human factors that were present in the process of choosing an airframe and optimizing it to accomplish a particular mission.

Mission: For this assignment I chose the Agricultural mission and designed what I felt to be an optimal UAS for the assumed tasking.

UAS Design: I settled on the following configuration as my optimal system: Condor Octorotor (8 rotors) UAV with the X8 Black Electric motor for the powerplant. For payload configuration, I equipped the airframe with the auto control and GPS module, a gimballed EO camera, LiDAR, a humidity sensor, ERA Enterprises Xtreme 5600 battery, and a dipole antenna. I opted for the man-portable model of the ground control station (GCS) because it provided a greater control signal range than the hand-held option. Below is a screenshot of my final configuration and specs.



Fully Assembled Condor with Payload




Performance: The Condor was selected after flying test missions with the Tern fixed-wing platform, the Harrier and Razorbill quadcopters, and the Toucan flying wing airframes. The main issue with the fixed wing model was the speed and turning radius required to operate over the field. The smaller quadcopters lacked the payload capacity and compatibility with many of the payloads I wished to employ. I modeled much of the configuration off of DJI's AGRAS T-20 which is a hexacopter (6 rotors) designed for crop dusting in the newly ermerging industry of precision agriculture.

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The EO camera with gimbal was chosen for color imagery, but a multispectral camera would have been preferred (unfortunately, the Hub didn't have a multispectral camera). Multispectral analysis can be used to determine overall crop health in the out of vegetative indices (VI) as well as disparity in soil/water composition (Candiago et al., 2015). The LiDAR has also been proven an effective tool for measuring plant density and counting the numbers of individual trees or plants growing in close proximity.

Human Factors Discoveries during Flight Planning and Execution: No terrain analysis is available during flight planning unless auto control (GPS module) is loaded and preplanned waypoints are plotted. Both auto and manual control would benefit from a topographical map or something similar to an FAA sectional/TAC chart with obstacle locations and heights above ground level (AGL).The terrain analysis graph in the flight planning area does not account for clearance of obstacles like trees. If you've seen some of my other recreational quadcopter flying footage online, you know I've captured some real close-up HD footage of trees 😀...and that experience was duplicated in the the Hub much to my chagrin.



Flight Planning in The Hub



Other human factors issues I noted during my exploration included the fact that flight planning does not allow for propagation of flight parameters like speed and altitude. Each point has to be clicked on to view parameters and then set individually. This is not only unnecessarily time consuming, but also means there is a lot more room for human error during data entry.

Finally, link degraded between 430m -496m which was the farthest point on the flight plan away from the GCS. The man-portable model indicates a range of 500m during assembly, but actual flight demonstrated this was considerably shorter. If this is a long-term recurring mission or there are other crops in the area to be serviced, one should consider the installation of a ground-based repeater antenna to extend the range without sacrificing link quality. Assembly or flight planning software should provide some sort of graphical depiction of the expected signal coverage overlaid on the map to assess link possible link degradation before flight.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Leave a comment below. If you have a topic you'd like to see covered in future blogs - let me know. 

-DP

***Disclosure: the author currently holds a position in AgEagle Aerial Systems