A Review on the Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Internet of Things Towards Smart Farming

Introduction

Technology has gotten ingrained in every element of our life as a result of rapid technological growth and a reduction in human abilities. Agriculture and irrigation are two fields where man's potential can be fully realised. In order to commercialise in the industry, various sensors and electrical gadgets are used to keep prices low in a few fields. Agriculture is derived after two Latin words 'Ager' and 'Culture,' that indicate 'Land' and 'Cultivation,' respectively. It is a milestone in human evolution and one of the benchmark domains. Throughout human history, extensive revolutions have been planned to advance agricultural production with fewer assets and labour. Notwithstanding this, the population density has never allowed demand and supply to equal over time. Agriculture is vital to the survival of more than 60% of the world's populace. Based on the statements made by Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, agricultural output covers around 12% of entire terrestrial zone (Zavatta, 2014). According to the projected scenario, the global population will spread up to 9.8 billion in 2050, representing a 25% increase over the current situation (Samir & Lutz, 2017). As a result, the emerging countries are expected to see nearly the same population growth as the developed countries (Le Mouël & Forslund, 2017).

On the other hand, urbanisation is expected to continue at a rapid pace, and nearly 70 percent of the population of whole world is expected to be built up by 2050 (Chouhan et al., 2020). In India, the population is estimated to be around 1.2 billion people. 50% people is employed in the agriculture sector, and approximately 61.5 percent of the population in India is mostly reliant on agriculture aimed at their living (FAO in India, 2017; Sawe, 2017).

Agriculture, on the other hand, has been undergoing the fourth revolution in recent decades as a result of the incorporation of Information and Communications Technologies into conventional agriculture (Sundmaeker et al., 2016). Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics, Remote Sensing, IoT, and UAVs are all promising technologies that might help agricultural systems innovate (Walter et al., 2017; Wolfert et al., 2017). Many agricultural restrictions, such as environmental circumstances, development state, soil status, irrigation water, pest and fertilisers, weed control, and greenhouse production environment, can be monitored in smart farming to increase crop yields, lower costs, and enhance process inputs (Nukala et al., 2016). Smart agriculture is a green technology practise since it reduces traditional farming's environmental footprint (Walter et al., 2017). Smart irrigation and minimal fertiliser and insecticide use in crops can further reduce leaching troubles and yields, as well as the influence of climate change in precision agriculture (Walter et al., 2017), (Wong, 2019). One of the most revolutionary technologies in modern wireless communications is the Internet of Things (Atzori et al., 2010). The main idea is to connect various physical items or devices to the Internet by employing certain addressing patterns. Transportation, healthcare, industry, cars, smart homes, and agriculture are all possible applications of IoT technology (Al-Fuqaha et al., 2015). To improve farming, IoT platforms deliver important data on a broad variety of physical restrictions in an agricultural system (Nukala et al., 2016). The importance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to the IoT platform is undeniable, as most IoT applications in a variety of markets rely on wireless data transfer (Ghosh & Dey, 2021).