Design and development of an autonomous agricultural drone for sowing seeds

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the design and fabrication of an autonomous agricultural drone for sowing seeds in the crop fields. In order to reduce the seeds sowing time, a seed sowing device has been specially developed and integrated with the quad-copter agricultural drone. The drone consists of a global positioning system (GPS) and an auto-pilot device, the flight path of which is controllable from the ground control station. The flying path can be programmed in the Mission-Planner software before the drone flight starts and can be altered if required. In addition, the agricultural drone is manually controllable using a long-range remote controller. It can fly under variable altitude where the maximum altitude is ~ 500 meter. The drone can fly at a maximum speed of 14.76 km/hour. The maximum seeds sowing rate of 498 m2/min is achieved for an altitude of 5 meter. At this seeds sowing rate, the mode value of seeds' distance is ~ 2.5 cm. We can control the seeds sowing rate by controlling various operational modes of the seeds sowing device. The proposed agricultural drone will reduce the seeds sowing time significantly and contribute towards the automation of the agricultural sector.