Development of a high-resolution aerial remote-sensing system for precision agriculture

An autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based aerial remote-sensing system was developed for multispectral imaging of agricultural farms. This system consists of on-board and ground-station subsystems. The on-board subsystem was equipped with body and wings, eight DC brushless motors and eight speed controls, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a global positioning system (GPS), a rechargeable three-cell lithium-polymer battery, a high-resolution multispectral camera, camera mount, and autopilot intelligent navigation system. The ground station was equipped with a radio control, TV monitor, laptop, and flight monitor software. In addition, a telemetry system was used to communicate between the on-board and ground-station subsystems. To investigate the performance of the UAV, several flight tests were carried out in wheat farms, and some technical features of the system were investigated. The acquired imageries were processed and evaluated. The spatial resolution of the imagery obtained from a height of 10-250 m was 3.6 -95 mm/pixel, respectively. Based on the results, the UAV remote-sensing system proved to be extremely promising for monitoring the temporal changes in the studied farm. The supervised classification map with 94% overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of 0.9 emphasized the conclusions.