Near ground platform development to simulate UAV aerial spraying and its spraying test under different conditions

Abstract Aerial spraying using UAV has gained great interest worldwide. UAV spraying can overcome crop height limits and is unlikely to crust soil or damage crop plants. More experiments concerning spraying are needed, such as spraying method tests, spraying droplet analysis, variable rating spraying tests, etc. These experiments either take a long time for real flights or have an unrecognized danger to UAV in real flights. To address this problem, an indoor spraying platform, which consists of X-Y direction movement and wind field generation was developed to simulate UAV aerial spraying. The maximum moving speed in the horizontal direction was 3.5 m/s and 0.25 m/s in the vertical direction. The horizontal moving distance was 11 m and the vertical moving distance was 0.5 m. The platform consists of 4 parts: upper machine software, central controller, X-Y moving part and far end spraying structure. CAN bus was used for communication between the central control board and far end controller. An experiment was carried out to test how the platform performs with different moving speeds and different wind strength. The wind strength test shows that wind forces the deposit down to the ground when droplets were equally affected by 2 wind forces. The result shows that the platform can meet the requirement of UAV aerial spraying.