Design of a Quadcopter Autopilot System to Take Aerial Photography for Remote Sensing Applications in Agriculture

Abstract

This paper presents the design and test of an autopilot control system of quadrotor helicopters for collecting aerial images in agriculture applications. The designed system is built based on the Naza-M Lite flight control system with a GPS module. A Texas Instruments Stellaris EK-LM4F120XL module is employed as the main control unit for managing the autopilot mode and other vital functions. This system also includes a ground station playing a key role to transmit/receive the airplane’s GPS coordinates via RF links. Initial experimental results show that the quadcopter can fly along the planned flight routes on the Google Maps. The designed quadcopter is equipped with a 5-Mpixels camera capable of taking aerial photos of rice fields at specified locations. Taken aerial images processed using the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) technique can provide farmers with information about photosynthesis status of plants. Optimizing performance of the control system to improve stability and increase flight times of the quadcopter will be the main topic of our future work. The system is expected to be a suitable solution for taking aerial photography to assess growth and development status of large-scale rice fields and fruit plantations.