Nishanthini Kamaraj

Pest monitoring and management using drones Nishanthini Kamaraj

Drones, also called as remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles, have gained popularity as new platform to monitor and manage agricultural pests in various crop fields. UAV's used in precision agriculture, photogrammetry and remote sensing. In precision agriculture is to analyze their applicability in agriculture operations like crop monitoring, crop estimations, pesticide spraying, soil and field analysis. UAVs are equipped with the cameras and sensors to acquire photographs and videos for monitoring insects in crop and sprayers for pesticide spraying. In agriculture, the first UAV model is developed by Yamaha for agriculture pest control. Crop monitoring and pesticide spraying UAVs are developed consisting of an automated drone system and sprinkling system with multi spectral camera. The sprinkling system is attached to the lower region off the UAV which has a nozzle beneath the pesticide tank to sprinkle the pesticide towards downstream. First monitoring is done by multi spectral camera; the camera scans the whole crop field and generates a spatial map. This map manifests the condition of the crop through NDVI and then the farmer evaluates which types of pesticides used.