The application of unmanned aerial vehicle to precision agriculture: Verification experiments of the power consumption

Recently precision agriculture technology has been introduced to cassava planting which is an economic crop of Thailand. And the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is considered as a system for investigating the crop growth in large cultivated area. Therefore a prototype UAV has been developed for this project. In this work the flight test has been performed to collect the data of power consumption of propulsion system which will be used to decide the suitable flight path. The results showed no significant dependence on the payload weight and the flight altitude. But the prototype UAV consumed more current in the crosswind path to maintain the commanded airspeed and altitude and to force against the side slip.