Lecture 16- Unmanned aerial vehicle/Drones for

precision agriculture
Introduction
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)/drone is useful for a variety of applications, such as
scouting out new field locations, providing quick and easy ways to remotely check small
sections of crops, and surveying entire fields. Drones are helping farmers address several of
the developing challenges in the agriculture and allied sector. The use of drones can help to
increase productivity, permitting for improved agricultural adaptation to the effects of
climate change; they can also assist in the reduction of pollution. UAVs equipped with
special sensors can collect multispectral images that are stitched to generate spectral
reflectance bands. These bands allow users to calculate indexes such as a Normalized
Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a Leaf Area Index (LAI) or a Photochemical
Reflectance Index (PRI), allowing farmers to view crop changes or stress conditions that are
otherwise invisible to the human eye.

Unmanned aerial vehicle/Drone

The unmanned aerial vehicle refers to a pilotless aircraft, a flying machine without an on-
board human pilot is also called as a drone. The ‘unmanned’ refers the pilot located
elsewhere controlling the aircraft via a ground control station through wireless linkages
(control and command links) plus the sensor(s) mounted on the UAV and the software that
may be used to analyse the data gathered by the sensor(s). A UAV can be operated manually,
or programmed to operate automatically or to be fully autonomous.

Fixed Wing
A fixed-wing UAV refers to an unmanned airplane that requires a runway to take-off and
landing, or catapult launching.

Figure 1 Fixed wing UAV

Copter
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 A helicopter refers to an aircraft that takes off and lands vertically; it is also known as a
rotary aircraft with the ability to hover, to fly in very low altitudes, to rotate in the air and
move backwards and sideways. It is capable of performing non-aggressive or aggressive
flight

Figure 2 Quodcopter and Hexacopter

Quadcopter: A four bladed drone, the most common basic type, because that number of blades
gives more stability
Hexacopter and Octacoter: A six bladed drone, offer higher power abilities hence it can have
much better elevation and speed controls as compared to quadcopters. Hexacopter are
designed with improved safety features by utilizing additional motors. Hexacopters are able
to offers higher payload capabilities
Octocopter: A eight bladed drone, extremely fast and agile, reach higher altitudes and more
powerful and reliable. It has capable of lifting heavier camera equipment with extra safety
features. Very stable flyers, handle better in adverse weather conditions
Components and operation tools of Drones
Payload: Anything the drone carry other that required for its flight like a camera
Attitude: This is the orientation of drone, whether its tilting forward and backward or flying
upside down. It includes pitch, roll and yaw
Pitch: It represents the orientation of UAVs in association with Roll and Yaw. Pitch says whether
the UAV is tilted up or down
Roll: It represents the orientation of UAVs in association with Pitch and Yaw. Roll is when you
twist the drone as if you intend to twist it all the way around its control axis.
Yaw: It represents the orientation of UAVs in association with Pitch and Roll. Yaw is when the
drone is turning slightly left or right.
Gyroscope: It detects the whether the flying is at level
Gimbal: The type of mount that lets a camera stay steady on a UAV while turning and when in
high wind
Advantages of drones
• Data of any area can be obtained at any time / season / date.
• By virtue of their small size and easy operation, drones are cheaper and more
efficient than manned aircrafts or satellite imaging.
• It provides cheaper imaging, greater precision and drone cameras can take high spatial (ie)
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 centimetre-level resolution images
• Prior detection of problems is possible.

Working principle of drone

Drones in agriculture are simply a low-cost aerial camera platform, equipped with an
autopilot using GPS and sensors for collecting relevant data, like a regular point-and-shoot
camera for visible images.
While a regular camera can provide some information about plant growth, coverage and
other things, a multi-spectral sensor expands the utility of the technique and unleashes its full
potential. It allows you to see things which you cannot see in the visible spectrum, such as
moisture content in the soil, plant health, stress levels and fruits.
The basic principle of NDVI relies on leaves reflecting a lot of light in the near-infrared, in
stark contrast to most non-plant objects. Leaves are green in colour due to the presence of a
pigment called chlorophyll, which strongly absorbs almost all non-green light from the
visible spectrum of sunlight and reflects mostly green light back to our eyes. Living green
plants absorb solar radiation in the photosynthetically active region (PAR) and leaf cells re-
emit the solar radiation in the near-infrared spectral region. Thus, a healthy plant appears
dark in PAR and bright in near infrared. In contrast to normal plant, unhealthy or stressed
plant leaves reflect less near-infrared light with unchanged visible spectrum emission.
Generally, combining these two signals can help differentiate plants from non-plants and a
healthy plant from a sickly plant. The ration of different reflected radiation helps to develop
indices like the NDVI, which is now used to assess plant health.
With the advancement of technology, it is now relatively inexpensive to modify a consumer
camera to collect infrared bands and to fly it aboard a small drone. The ground resolution of
UAV imagery is more than one thousand times higher as the reflected radiation does not
have to travel through the entire atmosphere to be collected, and the incident light is
dramatically more varied.
Using near-infrared, you can identify stress in a plant, ten days before it becomes visible to
the eye. When a plant got affected by water, fertilizer or pest and disease stress and its
photosynthetic activity get reduced and that affects the chlorophyll synthesis. Based on the
chlorophyll variation near-infrared sensor can detect the healthy and unhealthy plants

Data collection and processing modalities of drone

To monitor the crop health condition by drone, first to prepare well defined flight path of
the drone covering the area of interest. Many of the latest agricultural drones come with
flight-planning software that let you outline a box around the area of interest you want to
survey on Google Maps. The flight path plan is then automatically computed with the help of
software. The drone then flies over the field in a pattern while taking pictures with one or
more cameras with special light sensors. These pictures are geo-tagged and overlap each
other.
After landing, special software package is used to stitch together the geotagged photos into a
large mosaic and processed to interpret the amount of light that is reflected in different

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 wavelengths. Processing this data makes areas of poor growth or stressed plants easy to
identify.
Downstream software packages used to process the high-resolution images and data from the
different sensors on a drone and to generate a meaningful and insightful data. Most
agricultural drone operators use a tool like Pix4D or Correlator3D to turn these aerial images
into useful data. Others use proprietary software packages custom-built for their devices.
In developed economies of the west, companies also provide only a back-end processing
service that will analyse the data once uploaded and generate reports for you. Other smaller
start-ups have developed their own sensors, software packages and extensive back-end
analytics support that can be used with any UAV.
Some of this software is also built to avoid reliance on cloud-computing; all analytics can be
performed on a local computer once downloaded and set up. Some companies have also
developed core intellectual property enabling the identification of weeds from crop plants
using multi-parametric image analysis. This further extends the capabilities of drone-based
agriculture systems.
Constrains of Drone usage
• Outdoor use is highly weather dependent
• Imaging can vary depending on sunlight and cloud cover although one can account for ambient
lighting conditions
• Limited internet access and cellular infrastructure can make it harder to rely on cloud-based
computing services
• Higher costs especially for small landholders in emerging economies • Limited flight times
• Maintenance costs and resources
• The need for skilled operators
• Uncertain government regulation that need to be overcome before this technology can be
widely applied.

Application of Drones in Agriculture

The following are some of the applications of Drones in agriculture and in its allied fields:
• Water stress detection.
 Estimation of nitrogen level.
• Pathogen detection.
• Aerobiological sampling.
• Plant health monitoring.
• Mapping invasive weeds.
• Monitoring herbicide applications
• Forest fire monitoring
• Monitoring biodiversity in forests
• Assessing erosion in agricultural fields