future.
images for later analysis.
Be it a RQ-9 Reaper or a quadrotor these strangelooking planes carry a wealth of sensors in their bulbous noses: colour and black-and-white TV cameras,
image intensifiers, radar, infra-red imaging for lowlight conditions and lasers for targeting. Whatever
the case may be, they have been proved to be of extreme importance in many areas.
This low-altitude view gives a perspective that farmers have rarely had before. Compared with satellite
imagery, it’s much cheaper and offers higher resolution. Because it’s taken under the clouds, it’s unobstructed and available anytime. It’s also much cheaper than crop imaging with a manned aircraft, which
can run to thousands an hour.
The quote below was published in Technology Review
by Chris Anderson, the former Editor in Chief of
Wired, the cofounder and CEO of 3D Robotics and
founder of DIY Drones. I found it of much interest as
it gives one a good idea of what can be achieved
with the use of drones in agriculture, and I quote:
The advent of drones this small, cheap, and easy to
use, is due largely to remarkable advances in technology: tiny MEMS sensors (accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, and often pressure sensors), small GPS
modules, incredibly powerful processors, and a range
of digital radios. All those components are now getting better and cheaper at an unprecedented rate,
thanks to their use in smartphones and the extraordinary economies of scale of that industry. At the heart
of a drone, the autopilot runs specialized software—
often open-source programs created by communities
such as DIY Drones, rather than costly code from the
aerospace industry.
“Ryan Kunde is a winemaker whose family’s pictureperfect vineyard nestles in the Sonoma Valley north
of San Francisco. He is not your average farmer but
also a drone operator—and he’s not alone. He’s part
of the vanguard of farmers who are using technology
to grow better grapes using pictures from the air,
part of a broader trend of using sensors and robotics
to bring big data to precision agriculture.
To Kunde and the growing number of farmers like
him, a drone is simply a low-cost aerial camera platform: either miniature fixed-wing airplanes or, more
commonly, quadcopters and other multi-bladed small
helicopters. These aircraft are equipped with an autopilot using GPS and a standard point-and-shoot camera controlled by the autopilot; software on the
ground can stitch aerial shots into a high-resolution
mosaic map. Whereas a traditional radio-controlled
aircraft needs to be flown by a pilot on the ground,
in Kunde’s drone the autopilot does all the flying,
from auto take-off to landing. Its software plans the
flight path, aiming for maximum coverage of the
vineyards, and controls the camera to optimize the
Field mapping at low altitude
Photo: https://pixabay.com/en/drone-rotorcraft-remote-aerial-792995/
Drones can provide farmers with three types of detailed views. First, seeing a crop from the air can reveal patterns that expose everything from irrigation
problems to soil variation and even pest and fungal
infestations that aren’t apparent at eye level. Second,
airborne cameras can take multispectral images, capturing data from the infrared as well as the visual
spec