An Intelligent Drone for Agriculture Applications with the Aid of the MAVlink Protocol

Abstract

In the present, agriculture fields in India are facing the problems not only with their wages, but also with labor because of the change in climate and crop product losses due to the pests. This could challenge the additional requirements in precision agriculture technologies. The electronic and mechanic fields are made a revolution in monitoring the agriculture fields introducing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The proposed work introduces a multi-rotor drone system which comes with a solution that can exterminate the perilous situations faced by our farmers. The current study, introduced a low cost, lightweight drone system which can operate at low altitude operating conditions during the flight over the crop field. This drone system has combined the implementation of various mechatronic components like flight controller (FC), brushless motors (BLDC), electronic speed control (ESC), global positioning system (GPS), telemetry radio link, and radio-controlled transmitter and receiver. The motion of the drone system is done over the crop filed as per the one planned path using “APM Planner” application. It is controlled with the help of a MAVlink protocol which is an open-source, point-to-point networking protocol which carries telemetry. The communication between multi-rotor and ground control station (GCS) is done using MAVLink networking protocol. The drone can be controlled remotely by sending and receiving data through the MAVlink protocol to the drone control modules: flight controller (ATmega2560 processor) autopilot and the APM Planner application. With the availability of above mentioned new technologies, it is possible to observe the water stress management, crop management, crop harvesting, and crop protection. These drones have great potential due to its flexibility in handling to increase crop productivity. This model developed that brings technological and economic support to small farmers.