A Comprehensive Survey of the Recent Studies with UAV for Precision Agriculture in Open Fields and Greenhouses

Abstract

The increasing world population makes it necessary to fight challenges such as climate change and to realize production efficiently and quickly. However, the minimum cost, maximum income, environmental pollution protection and the ability to save water and energy are all factors that should be taken into account in this process. The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in agriculture to meet all of these criteria serves the purpose of precision agriculture. As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can easily obtain real-time data, they have a great potential to address and optimize solutions to the problems faced by agriculture. Despite some limitations, such as the battery, load, weather conditions, etc., UAVs will be used frequently in agriculture in the future because of the valuable data that they obtain and their efficient applications. According to the known literature, UAVs have been carrying out tasks such as spraying, monitoring, yield estimation, weed detection, etc. In recent years, articles related to agricultural UAVs have been presented in journals with high impact factors. Most precision agriculture applications with UAVs occur in outdoor environments where GPS access is available, which provides more reliable control of the UAV in both manual and autonomous flights. On the other hand, there are almost no UAV-based applications in greenhouses where all-season crop production is available. This paper emphasizes this deficiency and provides a comprehensive review of the use of UAVs for agricultural tasks and highlights the importance of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for a UAV solution in the greenhouse.

Smart Irrigation for Climate Change Adaptation and Improved Food Security

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An Accurate UAV Ground Landing Station System Based on BLE-RSSI and Maximum Likelihood Target Position Estimation

“…UAVs are revolutionizing engineering practices thanks to the recent developments in electronics, communication systems, robotics, and intelligent signal processing. UAVs have proved their usefulness in areas such as surveillance, transportation, and remote sensing [1][2][3][4]. However, the next generation of UAVs requires self-controlling systems to estimate their position and perform autonomous missions [5,6].…”

A Relative Coordinate-Based Topology Shaping Method for UAV Swarm with Low Computational Complexity

“…The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm, first introduced by Schiller et al in 1993 [1], is an intelligent cooperative system that provides the advantages of multi-functional integration, flexible adaptation to dynamic scenarios and increased mission efficiency compared with traditional single UAV platforms [2,3]. The UAV swarm has been extensively employed in the civil and military mission scenarios such as remote sensing [4][5][6][7], precision agriculture [8], emergency rescue [9,10], cooperative reconnaissance [11], confrontation [12], and emergency wireless communication [13][14][15].…”