Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Technology and Applications in Agriculture

Abstract

Numerous sensors have been developed over time for precision agriculture; though, only recently have these sensors been incorporated into the new realm of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). This UAS technology has allowed for a more integrated and optimized approach to various farming tasks such as field mapping, plant stress detection, biomass estimation, weed management, inventory counting, and chemical spraying, among others. These systems can be highly specialized depending on the particular goals of the researcher or farmer, yet many aspects of UAS are similar. All systems require an underlying platform—or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—and one or more peripherals and sensing equipment such as imaging devices (RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, near infra-red, RGB depth), gripping tools, or spraying equipment. Along with these wide-ranging peripherals and sensing equipment comes a great deal of data processing. Common tools to aid in this processing include vegetation indices, point clouds, machine learning models, and statistical methods. With any emerging technology, there are also a few considerations that need to be analyzed like legal constraints, economic trade-offs, and ease of use. This review then concludes with a discussion on the pros and cons of this technology, along with a brief outlook into future areas of research regarding UAS technology in agriculture.

A Review on Drone-Based Data Solutions for Cereal Crops

“…A number of review articles have also focused on examining the contribution of drones to the agricultural domain [22,[27][28][29][30][31][32]. The examination of drones for precision farming, in general, has been presented in many papers [22,29,30,32]. Similarly, a number of review articles on the use of imaging sensors for drone platforms are also available [28,31].…”

“…Applications of drone for aerial survey and mapping [49][50][51][52][53][54], forest [55][56][57][58], wildlife conservation [59][60][61], agriculture [22,[27][28][29][30][31], disaster management [90][91][92][93][94], documentation of cultural heritage [95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102], among many others, have been observed over the years. Examples of research cases in each of these domains are summarized in Table 2.…”

Agronomic Traits Analysis of Ten Winter Wheat Cultivars Clustered by UAV-Derived Vegetation Indices

“…In the present study, a significant correlation between agronomic parameters were revealed for each cultivar and VIs, but showed some limitations and weaknesses in the inter-cultivar analysis, since each cultivar has a specific own spectral response and function yield-VIs as stated before. According to Hassler and Baysal-Gurel [42], the potential of UAS in agriculture is very high, and the eBee fixed-wing UAV has been demonstrated to be a good tool for agronomic purposes on wheat [43].…”

Test and Comprehensive Evaluation for the Performance of UAV-Based Fertilizer Spreaders

“…Traditionally, mechanical fertilization was mainly performed using machines on the ground. Although their work efficiency and profit margins have been significantly improved, it is difficult for these machines to move in deep paddy fields and/or pass through crops where stem leaves are high enough to cover the row spacing [2,3]. In addition, the unacceptable soil and land damage caused by the long-term field application of high-horsepower ground machines should not be ignored [4].…”