When unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) support the Corps of Engineers in reconnaissance operations, in order to gather visible image information that should meet the mission’s need, we grouped the engineering reconnaissance information interpretation tasks into 10 levels by using the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS). The quantitative relationship between the engineering targets, sensor performance, and flight altitude was established through the general image quality equation (GIQE) and the geometrical property of the ground sampled distance (GSD). Through some simulations, the influence of variable factors of the EO sensor imaging quality was analyzed, and the imaging height of the sensor for an engineering reconnaissance scenario was calculated. The results showed that this study could solve the problem of poor image quality caused by the flight altitude not meeting the mission requirements.

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To increase the cutting efficiency for castor stem, the castor harvester cutting device was developed. The structure of the disc cutting device was designed. Cutting blade angle, sufficient working and minor cutting edge lengths were determined, which were 20°, 73 mm and 19.8 mm, respectively. The finite element model of disc cutter for castor stem was established. The incision volume was selected as the cutting performance evaluation index. The cutting process of the cutter was simulated. The results show that the cutting performance of the trapezoidal cutter is preferable to that of the rectangular and the curved cutters. When cutting blade cuts the stem, the volume of the incision decreases first and then increases, and the size of the incision increases with the increase of cutting edge angle. When the blade angle is 10°, the cutter has the ideal cutting quality. Considering the blade angle, the slip angle, and the angle of the cutter head as factors, the virtual test of the cutter was made with the incision volume as the index. The response surface analysis was used to obtain the cutter structure parameters when the incision volume was the least. The result for the blade, slip and cutter head inclination angles are 14.06°, 19.93°, and 10.54°, respectively. The cutting efficiency evaluation index (one-time cutting) was established to optimize the cutter running parameters. The results show that when the cutter moving speed was 1.011 m/s and the cutter rotation speed was 282.0 r/min, the maximum cutting efficiency is 2.25 castor stems/s.

Moth-flame optimization (MFO) is a novel metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the characteristics of a moth's navigation method in nature called transverse orientation. Like other metaheuristic algorithms, it is easy to fall into local optimum and leads to slow convergence speed. The chaotic map is one of the best methods to improve exploration and exploitation of the metaheuristic algorithms. In the present study, we propose a chaos-enhanced MFO (CMFO) by incorporating chaos maps into the MFO algorithm to enhance its performance. The chaotic map is utilized to initialize the moths' population, handle the boundary overstepping, and tune the distance parameter. The CMFO is benchmarked on three groups of benchmark functions to find out the most efficient one. The performance of the CMFO is also verified by using two real engineering problems. The statistical results clearly demonstrate that the appropriate chaotic map (singer map) embedded in the appropriate component of MFO can significantly improve the performance of MFO.