Development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Crop Protection and Production.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been developed and applied to help agricultural operations, such as crop dusting for crop protection and crop health sensing for crop production. UAVs were developed for aerial application over crop field beginning in the 1980s. Since then, especially in the last decade, the use of UAVs has proliferated in applications of aerial photography and imaging over crop fields to assist with precision crop production management. Over agricultural fields UAVs typically fly at low altitudes to acquire the remotely sensed data to complement remote sensing missions of high-altitude flights from piloted aircraft and even satellites in space. This presentation will present the study of UAV-based application platform for ultra-low volume spray of chemicals for vector control and discuss the potential and issues of UAV-based sprayers compared to the spray systems on manned aircraft for crop protection. This presentation will also present the development of UAV-based crop health remote sensing systems and discuss the prospective of the technology for promotion of crop production. The presentation will further describe the areas of UAVs developed for agriculture and discuss the limits and restrictions of agricultural UAVs. It should be noted that most agricultural UAVs are mini model fixed-wing airplanes or rotary helicopters at low cost, low speed, low ceiling altitude, light weight, low payload weight capability, and short endurance, which can only carry low-performance sensors and actually limit further development and application of UAVs for modern precision agriculture.