A Study on Development of Reliability Assessment Method for Industrial Drone

Abstract

In the past, drones have been developed for military use. Recently, however, the use of drones in industrial and civilian markets has been spreading rapidly because of their potential for various applications. The main application areas of industrial drones are aerial photography, logistics transportation, lifesaving, policing, wildfire monitoring and spraying agricultural pesticide. The reliability assessment and performance test methods of drones are not systematically established against such a rapidly growing market situation until these days. Therefore, in this study,
we developed reliability assessment methods and test equipment that can evaluate reliability of drone by performance test, environmental test, safety test and life test method, which can be used to ensure safety of individual users and reliability of industrial drones. In the development
of the reliability assessment method for industrial drones, we tried to verify drones’ reliability and to show the acceptable minimum limit required by manufacturer’s general specification. Furthermore, it is expected that we possibly obtain the degradation measure of the flight performance and the durability through the comprehensive performance and life test via applying the usage history and practical load in the laboratory. The developed methods were set up reflecting international standards, user requirements and field operating conditions. Since the field failure data of industrial drones has been reported rare in the manufacturing companies and research institutes until now. We think that it is necessary to obtain more than thousand's hours of the actual usage history and the failure data in order to correct or supplement the developed reliability assessment method in the future.