Drone agricultue is by far the most effective coupled with utmost precision...

Drone agricultue is by far the most effective coupled with utmost precision...

Drone agricultue is by far the most effective coupled with utmost precision...

Drones are meant for spectral imaging , they are cost effective too ...

do you recommend any specific costume drone for that ?

Well !!!!! I do not want to Saad ...

This comes with certain catch like licensing and regulations (at least in Canada ) check at your place too .

Try :

http://www.asctec.de/en/uav-drone/ascending-technologies/asctec-professional-line/asctec-falcon-8/uav-uas-drone-precision-agriculture-crop-soil-irrigation-control/

Prof. Anoop is utterly right. Yet, as my friend Prof. Aparna suggested, it is cost-effective. Just weigh the options

DEAR SAAD, HOPEFULLY IT WILL HELP YOU BY PROVIDING FIRST HAND INFORMATION.

The eBee SQ is built around Parrot’s ground-breaking Sequoia camera.

This fully-integrated and highly precise multispectral sensor captures data across four non-visible bands, plus visible RGB imagery1—in just one flight.

• Highly precise
• 4 multispectral bands
• + RGB data
• In 1 flight

With this precise data you can generate accurate index maps and use these to create high quality prescriptions—carefully optimising crop treatments to improve production quality, boost yields & reduce costs.

The eBee SQ can cover hundreds of acres in a single flight—up to 10 times more ground than quadcopter drones—for extremely efficient crop monitoring and analysis. This means fewer flights in total, for less time spent collecting data and more time acting on it.

https://www.sensefly.com/drones/ebee-sq.html

ANOTHER OPTION IS:

Octocopter! Experimental drone for agricultural research

An advanced eight-rotor model dubbed the octocopter (see 'Flight-al statistics' below), has been put through its paces by researchers led by Andrew Riche of Rothamsted Research, an institute devoted to plant, soil and agricultural science that receives strategic funding from UK bioscience funders BBSRC.

Rothamsted is the site of the longest running field experiments in the world, where farm systems and inputs such as fertiliser, pesticides and crop growth have been running for more than a hundred years. In the 21st century, they want to see if drone surveillance can take much of the drudgery and footwork out of these large-scale experiments that span over 200 hectares of picturesque English countryside. As a demonstrator technology, the researchers are embarking on a rigorous programme of regularly recording experiments over five hectares (the size of seven football pitches) to see exactly what this airborne marvel is capable of.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2015-09-octocopter-experimental-drone-agricultural.html#jCp

The octocopter is an enabling technology. It can be controlled manually or fly itself via GPS, and is fitted with special cameras that can image crop growth, and probably much more.

The craft has a regular RGB (red blue green) imager as in a conventional digital camera. It also has a TIR (thermal infrared) camera which can be used to monitor the crop canopy or soil temperature. The canopy temperature can give an indication of crop stress, because when plants experience drought for example their temperature rises as they stop evaporating water from their leaves.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2015-09-octocopter-experimental-drone-agricultural.html#jCp

The octocopter also carries a NIR (near infrared, also called multispectral) camera that takes images from which a measure called the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) can be calculated. NDVI gives an estimate of crop biomass, which is essentially the growth that scientists want to know when comparing different plant varieties or growing systems.

"We have found that we can measure crop height accurately from the images. We can also measure NDVI from images, usually we take these measurements on the ground, but the octocopter should be much quicker," says Riche.

Besides speed, other advantages include measurements that will be more accurate and consistent than if done by the human eye; it also frees up time for research assistants to tackle other projects – 16 minutes flight time could collect maturity data that would take four hours to collect in the normal way. However, some time is spent preparing for flying and then downloading and extracting data post-flight.

Crunch time

The process by which individual photographs taken on the copter's boom are translated into growth data demonstrates just how far imaging technology has developed since the advent of the first digital cameras.

In the first step, images are fed into software that aligns them to be geometrically uniform and true to scale in a process called orthorectification. "This means it makes them appear that they were taken parallel to the ground even if the camera was at an angle when the picture was taken," Riche explains.

The images are then added around each other into a large mosaic. With up to 500 images of a single experiment, there's a lot of overlap and the software (Agisoft Photoscan) stiches the images together to make one large orthomosaic. Next, the image is geolocated so it is located in real space and has proper scale, and this means meaningful measurements can now be taken from the image. The geolocation uses permanent markers ('ground control points') located within the experimental area, and accurately located by precision GPS – accurate to an astonishing 1cm.

"Finally the software produces a three dimensional model of the imaged area, using the large amount of individual images to build the 3D model," says Riche. "From the 3D model the height of the crop can be extracted, with different values for each individual plot."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2015-09-octocopter-experimental-drone-agricultural.html#jCp

https://phys.org/news/2015-09-octocopter-experimental-drone-agricultural.html