Enhancement Of Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles For Agricultural Aerial Sensor Systems

Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are used in a variety of agricultural research applications. However, UAVs are often not designed to interact with their attached sensor devices. This circumstance leads to disadvantages in sensor data acquisition and leads to increased efforts in post-mission data processing. This paper introduces a real-time sensor data software framework, executed on an embedded low-cost computer to aggregate carrier and sensor device measurements. The proposed setup provides functionality to control sensor devices and to retrieve, fuse, log and broadcast sensor data on-the-fly. A prototype implementation proved its functionality in an example use case of above-field micro-climate mapping with low-cost temperature, humidity and image sensors.