DEVELOPING AND FILED TEST OF A LOW-COST UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE FOR USING THE DIGITAL IMAGE CORRELATION METHOD
Abstract
Author(s): Wen-Pei Sung,*, Ming-Hsiang Shih, Han-Wei Hsiao and Shih-Heng Tung
Taiwan is located on Pacific seismic belt. Otherwise, global warming causes climate change to induce heavy precipitation and typhoons in summer. Therefore, people in Taiwan experience earthquakes and typhoons many times every year. Unfortunately, geological conditions in Taiwan can not suffer these kind nature hits to cause natural disasters, affected the life and property of people seriously. In order to rescue people’s life and protect property of citizens, disaster areas need to be investigated as soon as possible to provide more information for national rescue teams to adopted policy to integrate national emergency relief resources. Thus, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is provided with characteristics of quick deploy and reconnaissance. But, UAV is very expensive. Therefore, in this research, the concept of fixed wing airship, embedded simple microcontroller board, such as GPS, 3-axis Gyroscope, Gravity-sensor and Magnetometer, is used to construct a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Otherwise, the digital image correlation (DIC) method, applied digital camera, a non-contact optical measurement and computational capability of computer, has been developed by our research team. In this study, this developed UAV combines with developed digital image correlation (DIC) method and the remote sensing technology to expand as an automatic investigation device of cruise to monitor the possible occurrence of distressed area. The field test of this developed UAV combined with camera, installed with the developed DIC method, has been test and verified at mountain in central Taiwan. The analysis results of these tests reveal that this UAV with DIC can automatic flied through the preestablished positions to detect digital images. The practicability and mobility of this UAV with DIC method have been verified in this study. Keywords: Digital Image Correlation Method (DIC), Auto-Pilot, Open Source, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
