Long Endurance Site-Specific Management of Biochar Applications Using Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle and Unmanned Ground Vehicle

Abstract

Agricultural activities emit an increasing amount of carbon into the atmosphere, causing climate change. Carbon sequestration is one of the carbon-neutral technologies for reducing carbon emissions by spraying biochar in needed places, such as fertilizer places. It is critical to monitor carbon emissions and the use of biochar in order to properly manage carbon emissions. Prior methods, such as traditional soil or manure sample collection and semiautomatic analysis, are expensive and time-consuming, and they cannot make decisions in real time. We propose long-term, site-specific biochar application management using unmanned aircraft vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles equipped with proximity radar sensing. Our system takes the strategy that a UAV will land on a moving UGV to acquire long-range information with a reliable backup. Meanwhile, the UGV has many payload options to supply the UAV's sensing and actuation missions. We evaluated our system by using a simulated mission approach that contains the analysis of the controller for the landing sequence, and real-world vision-based landing marker tracking. Results show that our system achieves robustness landing control sequence and the error altitude calculation based on computer vision is less than ± 0.02 m on average.