Drone Technology to Address the Agriculture Needs

Indian economy primarily rely on the agriculture sector. Most of the villages and rural sector has the chief source of incomes. The produce from the agriculture contributes to the large portion of the indian export. In recent days, due to the several issues like water, immune insects and labour shortage, small farmers are being affected. In the same time, the advancement in drone technology is rapid and it demands several applications in the service sector. This advancement lead to the usage of drones in assisting the small scale farmers to meet their demands. The drone technology is used for spraying weedicides, insecticides, fertilizers and water in the agriculture fields. The usafe of drone in agriclture sector is elaborated in this blog.

Necessity for Agri drones:

Although manual spraying of fertilizers is available, the old farming practices followed by the farmers and the quality of the produce is not up to the standard. The major reasons and the necessity for using drones in indian agriculture industry is detailed as follows.

• Due to the labour shortage, the farmers are affected by the lack of labours for manual spraying. In addition, the health of the labour who spray such harmful chemicals are affected by such chemicals.

• The agriculture drones can be used for several applications like soil analysis, field monitoring, crop health monitoring, livestock tracking.

• Finally, the cost involved for such manual spraying is high compared to the selling cost of the crops. The time for manual spraying using backpack sprayer is very high which is also a tiresome job.

• The crop diseases are normally spread over a small portion of the agriculture land. Monitoring such diseased plantation is a complicated task for performing it manually by a farmer.

These issues make the farmers to rely on the modern technologies like drone to address their requirements.

Benefits of using Agri drones:

The usage of drones in farming benefits the farmers in several ways as discussed below.

• This emerging technology can minimise the time and maximise the successrate of the farmers.

• This can be reduced by the usage of agri drones which reduce the amount of insecticides (in turn reducing the cost of the farming). Subsequently the time for spraying the insecticides is reduced drastically on using such drones.

• The usage of the drones further benefits the farmers by providing them local monitoring. That is the crop region where specific monitoring is required or where the disease is spread can be monitored autonomously.

• Overuse or higher concentration of chemicals over the crops will also be detrimental for the crop growth. This is often the case in manual spraying, which can be completely avoided by the usage of drones.

• Further,the camera in the drones can be used to monitor minute pest attacks easily. They provide accurate range of the attack and the pesticides can administred accordingly.

• The health of the humans who are inhaling such toxic chemicals during manual spraying can also be reduced by the usage of such agriculture drones.

• Although the cost involved in the purchase of a drone is high, few small farmers can combine together and purchase a drone cooperatively. And such agriculture drones are not limited to certain plantations. They can be used for several plantations like cocunut, sugarcane, jasmine,arecanut and paddy, etc,

Components in the agri drones:

The drones used for agriculture will always be equipped with brushless DC motors to have maximum rotation speed. The drones are eqipped with storage tanks to carry the pesticides to the desired location. The drones oftern vary in their payloads from 5kg to 20 kg which is capable of carrying 20 litres of fertilizers. The motors are powered using LIPO batteries with high amperage discharge levels (6500W). The LIPO batteries discharges very quickly, hence to meet out the power requirement, IC Engines are used to recharge the battery on the fly.

The maximum thrust ranges between 5-7kg/rotor. In total, 8 motors (octocopter) is used for the high payload requirements. The next important part of an insecticide sprayng drone is the nozzle component. Few drones are equipped with individual pumps for the individual nozzles to have a wide spraying area. The above mentioned nozzle is termed as centrifugal nozzle. The flying speed is varied according to the requirement and it ranges between 8m/s to 22m/s. GPS modules and Camera are another essential component of the agri drone, if it is used for surveillance application. For livestock monitoring, Camera and GPS are essential inorder to localize the drone and to monitor the movement of the livestock,

Data Acquistion Procedure

The data is captured from the agricultural drones as mentioned below.

• First the area is analysed, that is the boundary is established and the GPS information is loaded into the drone’s navigation system.

• If the drone is to be operated autonomously, the flight pattern is developed. In the flight pattern, the obstacle is located and the navigation pattern is modified to prevent collision with the obstacles.

• During navigation, the RGB and multi spectral data is collected using the camera and the other onboard sensors. The data is transfered through RADAR for further processing.

• Using the data generated above, the 3D point cloud or the 3D map of the field is generated. The map is stored for future use and the drones can navigate autonomously without human intervention in a preloaded map area.

Funds provided by Indian Government:

When the Government of India announced the union budget for 2022-23 year, it decided to establish a special fund for agricultural technology start-ups. The Finance Minister Nirmala Seethraman added that, the introduction of drone technology for farming is to be made available even for the small farmers in villages. The budget covers multiple paths for the rise of the drone industry, and the NABARD fund, which focuses on promoting agricultural drones and supports startups, will bring the drone industry to a new milestone.

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/agriculture-drones-market

In addition the indian governement is also looking for drones to assess the crops, digitise the land records and spray pesticides in the farm lands.Thus, a startup based on drone technology for farming is a best solution for a budding enterpreneur.