Revolutionized Precision Farm Management UAV Based Multispectral Imagery for Crop Management and Disease Detection
(Room Innovation Hub-- Booth 2717)
03 May 16
3:30 PM
-
4:00 PM
Tracks:
Agriculture, Air, Commercial
As a licensed pilot and an Engineering, and having worked in UAV based remote sensing since 2003, I will mention my initial research and then move on into current developments using advanced UAV systems as part of an integrated farm management system providing advanced crop scouting and disease detection with the potential for "Xponential" growth in the use of these systems for precision farm management. UAV's can provide revolutionary crop scouting data at a reduced cost and risk when compared to manned systems. Robust aerial robots have the ability to be rapidly deployed and put to work on multiple remote sensing missions. Automated systems can become the farmer’s eyes and ears while also feeding data to automated farm management, irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting systems. In this way UAV's can be an integral part of an automated agricultural control system that will revolutionize farming. Multispectral image analysis can differentiate diseased areas of vegetation from normal areas. Research shows measurable differences in nonvisible light reflectance values between diseased and healthy plants for the species studied. Agricultural specialists and modern farmers are in effect professional level consumers (prosumers) who will pay approved professional operators and agricultural specialists to use drones to survey farm areas as part of an agricultural chemical distribution and portion control system and even more so they will pay for future systems which will be an integral component of advanced agricultural control and farm management. The drone’s ability to safely, quickly, and cost effectively survey farm areas and assist in precision control over chemical and fertilizer application rates can greatly increase farm profitability. Environmentalists and regulatory agencies can use drones for real time analysis of farm region point source pollution. Agricultural survey drones can monitor land use and take air samples to gain an idea of what agricultural chemicals are being used on crops as well as gather valuable data which can be used to make NDVI based calculations as to what statewide crop areas need to receive fertilizer or other chemical treatments. Current agricultural remote sensing and crop management systems employ a handheld or tractor mounted active NDVI scanner. These systems have a limited range with a scan with of less than 5 feet. Their limited scan with and terrestrial mount means that they cannot be used to rapidly scan an entire farm. These systems have been successfully used to take measurements of sample areas of fields which consultants and agronomists have hoped were representative samples of farm areas so as to make farm management prescriptions. However, the effectiveness of these systems will never be able to match the effectiveness of the whole farm approach which aerial remote sensing can provide. Current research using UAV’s involves efforts to correlate data from a multispectral camera system to the data from terrestrially mounted active NDVI scanners. Research has shown that there is a strong potential for obtaining data from a multispectral camera which has a strong correlation with current active NDVI scanners meaning that management algorithms used for many years now to make farm management prescriptions based on their data can soon be applied to multispectral UAV crop surveillance data. Despite differences in calculated NDVI index values data shows parallel reflectance curves indicating that an NIR camera can effectively be used for crop analysis. The current system is capable of scanning over 1000 acres in under 2 hours and so with proper correlation it will allow for a revolutionary whole farm approach to crop scouting and farm management. This will result in the exponential growth of UAV systems for crop scouting and the implementation of multispectral imager equipped UAV’s as part of a networked and integrated farm management system.