Autonomous mobile ground control point for accurate UAV remote sensing in agriculture (Conference Presentation)

Xiongzhe Han; J. Alex Thomasson; Tianyi Wang; Vaishali Swaminathan

doi:10.1117/12.2558249

27 April 2020 Autonomous mobile ground control point for accurate UAV remote sensing in agriculture (Conference Presentation)

Xiongzhe Han, J. Alex Thomasson, Tianyi Wang, Vaishali Swaminathan

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 11414, Autonomous Air and Ground Sensing Systems for Agricultural Optimization and Phenotyping V; 1141407 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2558249
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2020, Online Only

Abstract

Ground control points (GCPs) are critical for agricultural remote sensing that require georeferencing and calibration of images collected from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) at different times. However, the conventional stationary GCPs are time-consuming and labor-intensive to measure, distribute, and collect information in a large field setup. An autonomous mobile GCP and a cooperation strategy to communicate with the UAV were developed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the UAV-based data collection process. Prior to actual field testing, preliminary tests were conducted using the system to show the capability of automatic path tracking by reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) for lateral deviation from 34.3 cm to 15.6 cm based on the proposed look-ahead tracking method. The tests also indicated the feasibility of moving reflectance reference panels for every two successive flight paths without having detrimental effects on pixel values in the mosaicked images, with the percentage errors in digital number values ranging from -1.1% to 0.1%. In the actual field testing, the autonomous mobile GCP was able to successfully cooperate with the UAV in real-time without any interruption, showing superior performances for georeferencing, radiometric calibration, height calibration, and temperature calibration, compared to the conventional calibration method that has stationary GCPs.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Xiongzhe Han, J. Alex Thomasson, Tianyi Wang, and Vaishali Swaminathan "Autonomous mobile ground control point for accurate UAV remote sensing in agriculture (Conference Presentation)", Proc. SPIE 11414, Autonomous Air and Ground Sensing Systems for Agricultural Optimization and Phenotyping V, 1141407 (27 April 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2558249

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KEYWORDS

Unmanned aerial vehicles

Agriculture

Calibration

Remote sensing

Automatic tracking

Georeferencing

Data communications

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