Aerial robot for smart farming and enhancing farmers' net benefit

Abstract

The knitting of information and modern electronic technology with agricultural production system to determine, analyze and manage the critical temporal and spatial factors of farm for maximizing profitability, sustainability and environmental protection is need of hour. In this context, robot (Arial, Ground and Under-water) can play an important role. Aerial Robot is also commonly known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or Drone. It may be boon for management of agricultural production as it can focus on small crop fields at lower flight altitudes than other regular aerial vehicle to perform site-specific farm management operation with higher precision. It can also address adverse crop and land prerequisites, where use of conventional machines is challenging, e.g. spraying under wet paddy field, tall crop sugarcane, pigeonpea etc. Embedding the available technologies and methods for meeting functional, operational and structural requisite, specifically for the crop and land environment with Arial Robot is of utmost importance. On the basis of system range, accuracy, resolution, and precision, sensitivity, linearity, offset, hysteresis and response time of different sensing and control technologies, e.g. optical, near infrared, thermal multi-spectral, hyper-spectral, Light Detection and Ranging, radio frequency and sonar .This paper presents an overview of research involving the development of UAV technology for agricultural production management. Technologies, systems and methods are analyzed for in situ integration under Indian farm conditions. The limitations of current Arial Robot for agricultural production management are deliberated, moreover forthcoming needs and suggestions for development and application of the technology in agricultural production management are projected.