Fine-Tuning of UAV Control Rules for Spraying Pesticides on Crop Fields

Abstract

Abstract-The use of pesticides in agriculture is essential to maintain the quality of large-scale production. The spraying of these products by using aircraft speeds up the process and prevents compacting of the soil. However, adverse weather conditions (e.g. the speed and direction of the wind) can impair the effectiveness of the spraying of pesticides in a target crop field. Thus, there is a risk that the pesticide can drift to neighboring crop fields. It is believed that a large amount of all the pesticide used in the world drifts outside of the target crop field and only a small amount is effective in controlling pests. However, with increased precision in the spraying, it is possible to reduce the amount of pesticide used and improve the quality of agricultural products as well as mitigate the risk of environmental damage. With this objective, this paper proposes a methodology based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the fine-tuning of control rules during the spraying of pesticides in crop fields. This methodology can be employed with speed and efficiency and achieve good results by taking account of the weather conditions reported by a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In this scenario, the UAV becomes a mobile node of the WSN that is able to make personalized decisions for each crop field. The experiments that were carried out show that the optimization methodology proposed is able to reduce the drift of pesticides by fine-tuning of control rules.

Evaluation of Altitude Sensors for a Crop Spraying Drone

“…It consists of using pulverization devices to spread a certain type of pesticide or fertilizer to provide a better result for the harvest. This kind of production enhancement can provide increased productivity, improved quality and significant reduction of costs in large scale [12].…”

“…The airborne approach enables the coverage of much bigger areas at the price of a bigger waste because of not addressing only the necessary areas or due to the lack of accuracy and wind influence [12]. Ground based machines can be used for this purpose but this, in turn, has other challenges.…”

Applications of Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAV) in Agriculture : A Study

“…Bruno S. Faiçalatc. [18] have studied the spraying pesticides for protecting crops and to maintain the quality and quantity of crop yield. The application of these pesticides by using aerial vehicles increases the speed of the activity and avoids packing of the soil.…”

The Use of Computational Intelligence for Precision Spraying of Plant Protection Products

“…While it is common to use buffer zones to mitigate the damage caused by drift, this hazard can occur 5 to 32 km downwind , which far exceeds the range of the buffer zones. The use of UAV rotorcraft has been investigated as a safe and high-precision alternative for spraying pesticides (Bae and Koo, 2013, Faiçal et al, 2014a). This occurs because these aircrafts have no pilots on board and their downwash effect 2 is directed to the plantation (Hanson, 2008).…”

“…On making a determined convergence, the configuration stage is finalized and the algorithms are evaluated with their respectively defined configurations, in an individual way. The configuration for the PSO algorithm, set out in Faiçal et al (2014a), was not recommended by the GridSearch technique but was included in the experiments of this study, because it is concerned with a solution that is found in the literature and employed as a basis for evaluation.…”