Unmanned agriculture, which relies more on agricultural drones, is a breakthrough in science and technology that emerged in 2014.
Agricultural uAVs are equipped with GPS navigation systems that cruise automatically and standard cameras that are automatically controlled by the cruise system.
Software on the ground allows the drone to take high-resolution pictures of the ground.
The drone's cruise software USES traditional radio to control the drone's flight, including designing the flight path, maximizing farm coverage, and controlling the camera to facilitate subsequent image processing.
At low resolution, farmers could see images they had not seen before: crops could be observed at altitudes of up to 120 meters, which is the high altitude required by the U.S. government for unmanned aerial vehicles to fly regularly, and any higher would have to be reported to air traffic control.
Drone images are cheaper and have higher resolution than satellite images.
Drones can provide farmers with three types of detailed information.
First, observing crops from the air helps farmers spot irrigation problems, soil problems and even pests and bacteria that the naked eye can't detect.
Second, aerial cameras can provide multiple layers of images, capturing both the normal visual spectrum and infrared light, to help farmers spot health problems in crops that cannot be seen by the naked eye.
Third, drones can fly once a week, every day, or even every hour, providing time-ordered animations that demonstrate changes in crop growth and provide opportunities for better crop management or problem detection.
This is part of a trend of data-driven agriculture.
