Dr. Kevin Price, a Kansas State University professor of agronomy and geography had a powerpoint presentation on the uses of UAVs in agriculture last wednesday at the Great Bend Farm and Ranch Expo in Kansas.
The core of his presentation was about using unmanned aircraft with IR imaging capabilites to identify which plants will make good harvest and which will not. The previous method without the use of UAVs involved harvesting each grain individually and then testing it, which is as you can imagine, very inefficient. A UAV can take pictures in the desired wavelength in the matter of minutes, while manual harvesting and testing took up to fifteen thousand hours and was much more expensive.
The UAVs used for agricultural identification are equipped with an infrared camera with 1×1 pixel resolution and an onboard computer with a spectroradiometer, a device that is able to measure the strenght of different wavelengths of light producing a graph from which it is possible to easily determine which wavelength is present the most. Thanks to this technology scientists can identify healthy plants. The images produced are converted to near infrared wavelenghts and chlorophyll rich plants show up red on the images.
“The redder the picture, the greener the plant.”
Dr. Kevin Price
When a plant is stressed it produces chlorophyll much less than when it is healthy. This makes diseased or stressed plants easily identifiable and the farmers in turn know which plants to harvest and which ones to destroy instead. Another good use is preventing monocultures of grass in pastures from forming. Dr.Price’s presentation included an image of a pasture in Kansas, Old World Bluestem, where it was clearly visible how an invasive species of grass was overtaking the original prairie one.
“It’s estimated that we could lose 50 percent of the weight gain on cattle due to this grass becoming a monoculture.”
Dr. Kevin Price
His presentation also included a number of other uses of UAVs in agriculture, such as locating the best places for a red cedar tree rafineries (for fuel and biomass production – researchers are currently working on turning it into a renewable resource), helping farmers with cattle counting and he even speculated how it may be possible to identify ear tags with unmanned aircraft. He was also asked by The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks to try to asses the health of lakes by scanning for the presence of blue-green algae blooms and the resulting photos were more than impressive.
It seems to me that agriculture might be the most important branch of UAV research at the moment because of the importance of farming for continued growth of population and all the various uses it offers.
Příspěvek UAV reducing 15,000 hours of agricultural work into minutes. pochází z MENSURO