TY - JOUR
T1 - Performance evaluation of a multi-rotor unmanned agricultural aircraft system for chemical application
AU - Zhu, Hang
AU - Li, Hongze
AU - Adam, Anderson P.
AU - Li, Liujun
AU - Tian, Lei
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge TeeJet and Becky May for the donation of materials essential to the completion of this project and DJI for the donation of the UAS platform on which the spray system was built. This work was partially financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFD0200701).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Aerial sprayer
KW - Chemical application
KW - Effective swath width
KW - Flight parameters
KW - Onboard data acquisition system
KW - Performance evaluation
KW - Spray characterization
KW - Unmanned agricultural aircraft system
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U2 - 10.25165/j.ijabe.20211404.6194
DO - 10.25165/j.ijabe.20211404.6194
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113327455
SN - 1934-6344
VL - 14
SP - 43
EP - 52
JO - International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
JF - International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
IS - 4
ER -