Potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Agriculture

Abstract

In few years, agriculture drones emerge for monitoring, planting, spraying, and mapping to increase crop production and reduce labor. This review results show its significance and farmer's demand for agriculture. The UAV technologies enable farmer management based on measuring and observation based on real-time crop and livestock monitoring, significantly maximize their production. The farm drone consists of user-friendly software with interactive maps, and a global positioning system will improve production. It will support farmer for farming in efficient, effective, and economical ways.

A case study of a real-time internet of things system for site-specific potato crop management in El-Salhia Area-Egypt

“…Since the appearance of PA concept in the early 1980s, a lot of related technologies and methods 19 have been developed and evolved over time. Perhaps the most prominent technologies used in PA, which clearly appeared in its proposed solutions, are: the remote sensing which is a geospatial technology used for monitoring the physical characteristics of an agricultural field on the earth from a distance by acquiring its emitted or reflected electromagnetic radiation via sensors deployed on satellites or aircrafts; the Global Positioning System (GPS) which is a satellite-based radio-navigation system in which the agricultural data collection devices are equipped with GPS receiver calculates its distance from at least four satellites via the time taken by radio signals to propagate from each one, and from this it calculates the device real location on the earth; the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which is the software tool used to manage and analyze the acquired spatial data to deduce important implicit conclusion [20][21][22][23] ; spatial analysis and mapping techniques; Decision Support System (DSS) which represents a software technique utilizes a provided data to produce conclusions and guidance supports decision-makers in specific agricultural practice.…”

“…The success of DSS decisions in managing the agricultural process depends on the quality of information about the stages of growth of agricultural crops, while the traditional data acquisition technologies such as remote sensing and the GPS-equipped handheld data collection devices suffer from some limitations affect its accuracy such as the low temporal and spatial resolution, limited variety of available soil and plant data, and impossibility of implementing automation. Therefore, the recent technologies Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) are introduced as PA-enabling technologies for data acquisition solving a lot of their past technologies limitations and problems [22][23][24][25] .…”