Correlation Analysis of Energy Consumption of Agricultural Rotorcraft

With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in the field of agricultural plant protection. Compared with fuel-driven UAVs, electrically driven rotorcrafts have many advantages such as lower cost, simpler operation, good maneuverability and cleaner power, which them popular in the plant protection. However, electrical rotorcrafts still face battery problems in actual operation, which limits its working time and application. Aiming at this issue, this paper studied the influence of rotorcraft flight parameters on energy consumption through series of carefully designed flight experiments. First of all, the linear motion experiments have been designed that the rotorcraft was made to perform speed tests and acceleration test with the speed varied from 2∼9 m/s. Secondly, the turning maneuver experiments are carried out under the different circular routes, a rotorcraft was made to conduct successive steering maneuvers at a certain speed of 2 m/s. With the collected tests data, the relation of the energy consumption and the flight dynamic parameter are analyzed through correlation analysis, and the test results of different pairs of experiments have been compared. The research results of this paper would encourage the agricultural rotorcraft to make less maneuvers during operation, which can also provide practical experience and data support for subsequent optimization of flight parameters and reduction of energy consumption.