Fundamental Research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Support Precision Agriculture in Oil Palm Plantations

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to revolutionize various applications in civilian domain such as disaster management, search and rescue operations, law enforcement, precision agriculture, and package delivery. As the number of such UAVs rise, a robust and reliable traffic management is needed for their integration in national airspace system (NAS) to enable real-time, reliable, and safe operation. Management of UAVs traffic in NAS becomes quite challenging due to issues such as real-time path planning of large number of UAVs, communication delays, operational uncertainties, failures, and noncooperating agents. In this work, we present a novel UAV traffic management (UTM) architecture that enables the integration of such UAVs in NAS. A combined A*–mixed integer linear programming (MILP)-based solution is presented for initial path planning of multiple UAVs with individual mission requirements and dynamic constraints. We also present a distributed detect-and-avoid (DAA) algorithm based on the concept of resource allocation using a market-based approach. The results demonstrate the scalability, optimality, and ability of the proposed approach to provide feasible solutions that are versatile in dynamic environments.

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A Review on Current and Emerging Application Possibilities for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Acta Technologica Agriculturae ◽

10.1515/ata-2016-0015 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 70-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Ivan H. Beloev

Keyword(s):

Information Technology ◽

Invasive Species ◽

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽

Precision Agriculture ◽

Aerial Photography ◽

Paper Briefly ◽

Aerial Vehicles ◽

Advanced Information Technology

Abstract This paper presents a review on current and emerging application possibilities for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The introduction section of the paper briefly describes some of the application areas in which drones are currently being used. The next chapters of the paper describe more detailly the use of UAVs for aerial photography, filming, security and logistics, GIS, land and water surveys. The main focus of the last chapters is on the advantages and the disadvantages of the drones usage in precision agriculture, wildlife and nature observations and archaeology. The last chapters also provide information on how the advanced information technology solutions can be implemented in order to provide means for fighting invasive species, to increase the yield of certain crops, to monitor and predict flooding, wildfires and other disasters, etc. This paper provides only overview of the most interesting and widely available applications of the UAVs, but there are also many other more specific and dedicated solutions for implementation of the drones for different purposes.

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Review of Some Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Technology in the Resource-Rich Country

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app112110171 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (21) ◽

pp. 10171

Author(s):

Ravil Mukhamediev ◽

Adilkhan Symagulov ◽

Yan Kuchin ◽

Elena Zaitseva ◽

Alma Bekbotayeva ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽

Precision Agriculture ◽

New Technologies ◽

Economic Effect ◽

Traffic Monitoring ◽

Pollution Monitoring ◽

High Tech ◽

Engineering Structures ◽

Aerial Vehicles ◽

The Impact

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various spheres of human activity is a promising direction for countries with very different types of economies. This statement refers to resource-rich economies as well. The peculiarities of such countries are associated with the dependence on resource prices since their economies present low diversification. Therefore, the employment of new technologies is one of the ways of increasing the sustainability of such economy development. In this context, the use of UAVs is a prospect direction, since they are relatively cheap, reliable, and their use does not require a high-tech background. The most common use of UAVs is associated with various types of monitoring tasks. In addition, UAVs can be used for organizing communication, search, cargo delivery, field processing, etc. Using additional elements of artificial intelligence (AI) together with UAVs helps to solve the problems in automatic or semi-automatic mode. Such UAV is named intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle technology (IUAVT), and its employment allows increasing the UAV-based technology efficiency. However, in order to adapt IUAVT in the sectors of economy, it is necessary to overcome a range of limitations. The research is devoted to the analysis of opportunities and obstacles to the adaptation of IUAVT in the economy. The possible economic effect is estimated for Kazakhstan as one of the resource-rich countries. The review consists of three main parts. The first part describes the IUAVT application areas and the tasks it can solve. The following areas of application are considered: precision agriculture, the hazardous geophysical processes monitoring, environmental pollution monitoring, exploration of minerals, wild animals monitoring, technical and engineering structures monitoring, and traffic monitoring. The economic potential is estimated by the areas of application of IUAVT in Kazakhstan. The second part contains the review of the technical, legal, and software-algorithmic limitations of IUAVT and modern approaches aimed at overcoming these limitations. The third part—discussion—comprises the consideration of the impact of these limitations and unsolved tasks of the IUAVT employment in the areas of activity under consideration, and assessment of the overall economic effect.

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Crop Monitoring using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Review

Agricultural Reviews ◽

10.18805/ag.r-180 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jose Cuaran ◽

Jose Leon

Keyword(s):

Remote Sensing ◽

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽

Precision Agriculture ◽

Environmental Changes ◽

Great Opportunity ◽

Crop Monitoring ◽

Sensing Applications ◽

Aerial Vehicles ◽

Monitoring Applications ◽

Common Application

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have been developed significantly over the past two decades, for a wide variety of applications such as surveillance, geographic studies, fire monitoring, security, military applications, search and rescue, agriculture, etc. In agriculture, for example, remote sensing by means of unmanned aerial vehicles has proven to be the most efficient way to monitor crops from images. Unlike remote sensing from satellite images or taken from manned aircraft, UAVs allow capturing images of high spatial and temporal resolution, thanks to their maneuverability and capability of flying at low altitude. This article presents an extensive review of the literature on crop monitoring by UAV, identifying specific applications, types of vehicles, sensors, image processing techniques, among others. A total of 50 articles related to crop monitoring applications of UAV in agriculture were reviewed. Only journal articles indexed in the Scopus database with more than 50 citations were considered. It was found that cereals are the most common crops where remote sensing has been applied so far. In addition, the most common crop remote sensing applications are related to precision agriculture, which includes the management of weeds, pests, diseases, nutrients and others. Crop phenotyping is also a common application of remote sensing, which consists of the evaluation of a crop’s physical characteristics under environmental changes, to select the plants or seeds with favorable genotype and phenotype. Besides, multirotor is the most common type of UAV used for remote sensing and RGB and multispectral cameras are mostly used as sensors for this application. Finally, there is a great opportunity for research in remote sensing related to a wide variety of crops, crop monitoring applications, vegetation indexes and photogrammetry.

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