Review on unmanned aerial vehicles, remote sensors, imagery processing, and their applications in agriculture

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and the sensors they can be equipped with are becoming more technologically advanced and common place within the agricultural industry. The output analyses from UAV captured data helps drive decisions for improving input efficiency in agricultural systems, which can result in maximum return on investment and reduced environmental impact. Advances in UAV technologies provides producers with options for assessment of crucial factors impacting crop yield and quality including crop water status and nutrient stress, competition from weeds, insects, and pathogens, and soil characteristics and precision field maps. Thus, integrating UAV technologies as a component of production agriculture enables producers to identify and locate problem areas in their fields in near real time and take corrective actions once these areas are verified. UAV technologies also offers researchers with a non-destructive, objective manner for obtaining phenotypic measurements such as height assessment, biomass estimation, canopy reflectance, and abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, which can greatly expedite field data collection for advancing germplasm with desired agronomic traits. This review covers more than a hundred articles that were obtained from the existing literature and illustrates common UAV types, common sensor types, imagery processing options, and their practical application and pitfalls in the modern agricultural industry.

Automated summary

The advancement of UAV technologies in agriculture offers producers the ability to enhance efficiency and quality of crop production, as well as the capability to quickly identify and address problematic areas.