Precision Agriculture and UAV's

Introduction

Indian is one of the largest countries which depends on agriculture for economic growth, next to the United States and China, India has the largest net cropped area globally. Despite India's heavy reliance on agriculture, the country has not kept up with technological advancements to produce high-quality farms. Developed nations have already begun using new technologies like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for remote sensing (Zhang & Kovacs, 2012) (Aditya et al., 2016), photogrammetry (Everaerts, 2008), and precision agriculture (Colomina & Molina, 2014). UAVs typically have cameras, sensors, and sprayers for applying pesticides and monitoring crops. Many UAV models with both military and civilian uses have been used in the past (Blydenburgh, 1999). In precision agriculture, a technical analysis of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) involves evaluating their suitability for various agricultural tasks such as crop monitoring, crop height estimation, pesticide application, soil and field analysis. But the vital factors that determine their hardware implementations are weight, payload, range of flight, configuration, and cost. Technology, procedures, frameworks, and restrictions related to UAVs are investigated in this study. In agriculture, over 250 models are examined and condensed in order to choose the best UAV. Methodologies and essential elements needed to assemble a small, self-sufficient unmanned aerial vehicle, comprising hardware assembly, software system integration, autonomous flight control, aerodynamic modelling, design, and utilization.

Nowadays, unmanned aerial systems, are widely employed in remote sensing applications related to precision agriculture. When equipped with various sensors, RS makes it easy and affordable for growers to gather, visualize, and assess crop and soil health conditions at different stages of production. It can function as an early warning system to identify possible issues and present chances to deal with them quickly. In RS platform, like deployment duration and range, the sensor's separation from the target, the frequency and timing of image capture, the location and coverage area, are determined. Furthermore, UAVs potential to revolutionize traditional remote sensing platforms for real-time crop monitoring, weed detection, tree classification, water stress assessment, disease detection, yield estimation, and various pest and nutrient management strategies. This enables farmers to respond promptly to any issue that is identified (Zhang & Kovacs, 2012). For this reason, there are numerous reviews available regarding their use in smart farming and precision agriculture (Yang et al., 2018), (Yang et al., 2017), (Mogili & Deepak, 2018), (Puri et al., 2017). Most reviews concentrate primarily on the various uses of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in agricultural crops and environmental monitoring (Manfreda et al., 2018) in general. The hyperspectral imagery (Adão et al., 2017) and methods employed in these cases examined which available sensors are most appropriate for a given application, offering significant insights into the potential applications of UAVs in PA (Maes & Steppe, 2019).

Figure 1 shows several reviews of UAVs and their uses in different fields that highlight the prominence, importance, and surge of interest in this field among experts over the past ten years.