In recent years, more and more ** and law enforcement agencies are using drones for a bird's-eye view from the air. In order to perform the task efficiently, the drone must be able to quickly maneuver to the intended target. Fast maneuvering allows them to navigate complex environments and complete tasks efficiently. The requirements to become a certified drone pilot vary from country to country, but all require you to pass a written test on aviation knowledge administered by the Aviation Authority. Surprisingly, it is not required to demonstrate flight performance (as of the time of this article). So how do we compare the flying skills of two certified drone pilots?
Scenario:
There are two certified drone pilots, Aleks and Dustin, who need to assess how quickly they can locate the drone to the designated target, which in this case is 500 feet from the take-off site.
We want to compare whether the performance of Aleks and Dutin's performance is different. Timing starts in seconds at the time of departure (including liftoff, movement to target). The actual difference is 05 seconds, which means that if a pilot is able to get the drone to the location one second ahead of the time, it means that it is performing better. The experimental data are as follows:
Using Minitab, we can quickly create descriptive statistics.
We see that over ten flights, the average arrival time for aleks is 1586 seconds, while the average arrival time for Dustin is 1242 seconds.
The estimated difference is 34 seconds. The 95% confidence interval tells us that the true mean difference between drivers is as small as 1736 seconds, up to 5131 seconds. Based on this confidence interval, we can confidently say that the flight time is not only different from zero, but also because the lower bound of the confidence interval for the difference is greater than our 0With an actual difference of 5 seconds, we concluded that Dustin was the better performing drone pilot in this test.
The time-of-flight boxplot provides a visualization of the analysis
In the future, we can conduct follow-up experiments, including multiple distances, obstacles, multiple flight conditions, and multiple drones for pilots to use. Minitab provides analytics and visualization capabilities that make it easy to measure performance.