UAVs: The Future is Now

With the problems we are facing on Earth getting more and more severe, we are coming up with different solutions to make our lives easier. Unmanned aerial vehicles —commonly known as drones— are one of the most ground-breaking devices humans have invented. The first known record of a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) dates back to 1849, where the first of its kind was a balloon used to drop bombs during a battle between Austria and Italy [1]. The military applications of the first UAV used to be their sole purpose, but today they have various applications in several fields.

What is a UAV?

As its name suggests, unmanned aerial vehicles don't have pilots on board and these aircraft can be controlled by ground-based radio controllers or by autonomous pilot software. Physically, a simple UAV consists of a body, a power source, sensors, actuators, and a microcontroller to control the aircraft. These vehicles come in different forms. Some have multi-rotors, a single rotor, or fixed-wing types. Different forms of these make them capable of reaching dangerous places without putting lives at risk. Other than their original applications in the military, their use has reached areas like agriculture, rescue, surveillance, mapping, and pollution tracking. Through improvement in technology, UAVs are available to civilians and can be purchased easily. 

Applications

These vehicles have incredible abilities that improve efficiency in different fields, for example, it can be used to increase crop yield. This adaptation of technology in agriculture became necessary in order to keep up with the high population and high demand for crops. This can be done by using these devices for field analysis by obtaining data to determine the seed planting pattern at the start of the crop cycle. These aircraft also can be used to plant crops, which reduces costs by 85% [2]. Although crops are not the only applications of this technique, this method can also be used for reforestation. This works by the drones dropping special pods with germinated seeds and nutrients, which then penetrate the earth, making it easier for trees to grow and root. These drones can drop up to 120 pods per minute, which would both enable reforestation 150 times faster and ten times cheaper than before [3].

How to Make UAVs Widely Available

While working on a fixed-wing UAV with rotating actuators, I learned the process of building a UAV from scratch. Building a UAV has two parts. The first part is the body and the second part is the electronics and actuators. While building a UAV can be fun, it takes a lot of time and effort. Luckily, there is another way to get a UAV: commercially available products. Although commercial drones are widely available, they are expensive, so not everyone can afford them. That’s why I think cost reduction and modularity are good ways to make UAVs more widespread.

To make UAVs more affordable, spare parts need to be mass-produced so that they are easier and cheaper to make. In a research project with assistant professor, Ertugrul Cetinsoy, who is a recognised hybrid drone expert, we used a carbon fibre body for the UAV [4]. In our research, the carbon fiber body we made was effective, but that's not necessarily true in all cases. There are a lot of other alternatives that are more effective for mass production. In an internship in a plastic injection factory, I observed that mass production can be done by using only one mold to produce many products. In this way, strong and light plastic can be produced cheaply, making it more available for everyone. Also, in this situation, companies could provide employment opportunities for people.

Standardisation is another thing that is important in the process of developing a UAV that is widely available to everyone. A good example of how to do this is by making the blueprints for these aircrafts open source and making the aircraft themselves modular. By making the body parts into modules, when one fails in use, it can be easily replaced. This module system would also allow people to buy and use different module parts for various applications. For example, for agricultural use, there should be a module that contains fundamental farming tools, like a seeder or fertiliser sprayer. For search and rescue use, there could be modules that consist of small robot arms and sensors. With replaceable module parts, UAVs will become multipurpose in different fields.

References

[1] Shea O'Donnell. “A Short History Of Unmanned Aerial Machines (UAV),” Consortiq, [Online]. Available: https://consortiq.com/short-history-unmanned-aerial-vehicles-uavs/ [Accessed 25 October 2020].

[2] C. Yinka-Banjo, O. Ajayi. “Sky-Farmers: Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in Agriculture” IntechOpen, Dec 17 2019.

[3] Kate Whiting. (2019, Dec 4). “This tech company is aiming to plant 500 billion trees by 2060 – using drones,” World Economic Forum, [Online]. Available: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/technology-artificial-intelligence-ai-drone-trees-deforestation/ [Accessed 25 October 2020].

[4] Ertugrul Cetinsoy, Design and control of a gas-electric hybrid quad tilt-rotor UAV with morphing wing [Online], July 2015. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282889917_Design_and_control_of_a_gas-electric_hybrid_quad_tilt-rotor_UAV_with_morphing_wing