Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute has applied UAVs to assist the sampling of cultivated crop areas for 6 years. UAVs are used to monitor the production dynamics of sensitive crops and investigate the loss due to agricultural disasters. Besides filming and monitoring, UAVs can also be applied to agricultural spray.
UAV spray for dragon fruit / Examination of dosageUAVs are expected to replace manual sprayers to reduce chemical harm to farmers or operators while spraying. The optimal operation for the unmanned spray machine is established through the cooperation of the experts in insects, plant diseases and agricultural engineering professionals as the basis for the farmers to use UAVs. It will achieve the same pest and disease control effects while reducing the use of pesticides. In the future, the monitoring and agricultural spray functions will be integrated on the UAVs so that the UAVs will automatically find the symptoms and perform preventive agricultural spray control. Under the labor shortage, environmental-friendliness and food safety issues, intelligent unmanned agricultural spray machines will be the most suitable solution.
As a practice of intelligent agriculture, UAVs are applied to monitoring and agricultural spray. For monitoring, the development targets are quantification and early warning. Through image integration technology, UAVs are able to successfully quantify the loss of rice due to disasters and monitor crop health indicators. Such applications are very different from the practice of traditional agriculture, which can only rely on manual qualification investigation. The UAVs allow collection and detection of agricultural data in a more scientific way. We have found that agricultural spray by UAVs showed better outcomes in terms of pest control efficiency and pesticide usage reduction after application of UAVs to agricultural spray on 10 types of crops, field observation for several hundreds of times and investigation on spray droplet locations and pest control effect. Take dragon fruit as an example, to achieve the same effect, the amount of pesticide sprayed by UAVs is only 1/15 to 1/10 of that sprayed manually, and the spray efficiency is 4 times better. UAVs have greatly improved the efficiency of eco-friendly farming and pesticide-related food safety .
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▲ Chemical dosage analysis by different nozzles
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▲ Spray droplet test of sweet corn
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Using a UAV equipped with a hyperspectral camera for rice health investigationAgricultural UAVs will help farmers to produce agricultural products in a more timely, lower-cost, more labor-saving and more environmentally friendly way. Currently, they have been used to assist agricultural chemical spray and monitoring of 80-hectare large-scale paddy fields in Tainan City to ensure that the technology is practically applicable outside the lab. In the future, we will continue to focus on the development of new technologies that can incorporate Internet of Things and edge computing into the UAVs, and even automatically arrange UAVs by a central computer system, analyze crop production conditions, load pesticides and fertilizers by robots and allow UAVs to automatically fly to specific areas and spray chemicals, making agricultural production more intelligent, efficient and environmentally friendly.
