Adoption of Precision Agriculture by Detecting and Spraying Herbicide using UAV

Abstract

Farmers are facing the VUCA environment (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) and data indicating the contribution of farming to India's GDP has come down from 52% to 18% between 1951 and 2018, which is alarming. At this juncture, developing countries like India, where over 70% of the rural people depend upon the agriculture fields, adoption of disruptive technology (creative destruction) becomes the need of the hour, to enhance the crop yield and quality. Weeds are one of the major issues which severely affect the crop output. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drone is recommended, to address the problem. Globally, the market for agriculture drones to move from $1.3 billion to $ 6.52 billion by 2026. Globally agriculture is the second largest industry after construction in terms of drone adoption. But Indian farmers have difficulty in adopting (or) procuring UAV's, as the size of their farm is small, income is very less. Other problems associated with the adoption of UAV include knowledge transfer and training to farmers, service support and maintenance cost. DaaS (Drone as a service) model is proposed, for rural areas. This paper aims to focus on weed management by providing a safer and cost-effective solution. By integrating technologies like visible light (VIS), near-infrared (NIR) light on an Unmanned Ariel Vehicle along with a precise sprayer and a weed detection system backed up by a lithium-ion battery (for longer flight duration), can help the process of spraying weedicide efficiently. The accuracy of the tested model is 92.6% for far away detection module and 95.4 for close range detection. UAV's with sprayer protects the farmer and consumers from odour and side effects.