Design and Development of Multi-copter Drone Incorporating with Multispectral Sensor for Agricultural Application

Abstract

AbstractIn modern years, the remote sensing by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is deployed into the agricultural sector, for improving productivity and has been vastly developed in precision agriculture for various applications. Nowaday's vegetation and crop field have been successfully monitored and done through the UAV systems. Meantime the UAV- based agriculture remote sensing offers us a high spatial image and is more flexible compared to the satellite-based remote sensing data. In this work, the main criteria to fly a UAV with autonomous flight control that can carry a payload (Multispectral Sensor) and easy way to acquire aerial images. Drone with multispectral sensor captures the unhealthy plants and monitor the health status of the crop field, and also used to identify the diseases of crops in order to reduce the human work. The radiometric calibration by using the calibration reflectance panel (CRP) relates the raw pixel value from the captured image to absolute reflectance. The drone captured aerial images and CRP techniques were used in the agricultural framework to collect multispectral images and to assess various vegetation indices (VI) such as chlorophyll vegetation index (CVI), normalized different vegetation indices (NDVI), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI), etc. Moreover, the model builder has been created for calculating the different vegetation indices in the single toolbox for analysis of the crop health status and the vegetation greenness. The major advantage of this methodology is that mapping or finding out resources in remote areas can be made easy and at a low cost.KeywordsAgriculture UAVDroneMultispectral sensorCRPVegetation indicesNDVI