The use of an appropriate sensor on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is vital to assess specific environmental conditions\nsuccessfully. In addition, technicians and scientists also appreciate a platform to carry the sensors with some advantages such as\nthe low costs or easy pilot management. However, extra requirements like a low-altitude flight are necessary for special\napplications such as plant density or rice yield. A rotary UAV matches this requirement, but the flight endurance is too short\nfor large areas. Therefore, in this article, a fixed-wing UAV is used, which is more appropriate because of its longer flight\nendurance. It is necessary to develop an own controller system to use special sensors such as Lidar or Radar on the platform as a\nmultifunctionality system. Thereby, these sensors are used to generate a digital elevation model and also as a collision avoidance\nsensor at the same time. To achieve this goal, a small UAV was equipped with a hardware platform including a microcontroller\nand sensors. After testing the system and simulation, the controller was converted into program code to implement it on the\nmicrocontroller. After that, several real flights were performed to validate the controller and sensors. We demonstrated that the\nsystem is able to work and match the high requirements for future research.
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