Flight performance assessment of land surveying trajectories for multiple UAV platforms

Abstract

Crop monitoring of large areas using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is a process that involves multiple trade-offs. For a particular location a multicopter may be more suitable than a fixed-wing due to landscape, altitude, or weather conditions. In other cases the opposite may also be true and the best solution considering additional factors such as available energy and the time it takes to sample the area of interest. In this paper we evaluate the energy consumption, the total distance traveled, and the total time it takes for two unmanned aerial platforms, a fixed-wing and a multicopter to traverse different trajectories. We evaluate the performance of these two platforms using two trajectories: lawnmower and spiral. These trajectories guarantee a 60% both in overlap and sidelap. We analyze the trade-offs between traversing a given trajectory with both platforms and the impact of using a lawnmower instead of a spiral pattern in the context of precision agriculture applications.