Low Cost Precision Agriculture
Precision Agriculture : Swarm drone based insecticide spray using Off-the-Shelf components
We propose a Swarm based micro-aerial drone robots, to spray instectides for precision agriculture.
In this approach, A filled syringe is attached to the underbody of a micro-aerial drone. The plunger is activated to spray the liquid using an electo-mechanical actuator.
The target area is set based on the type of plant. Using CV the individual leaf/stalk is identified and predetermined quantity is sprayed.
We intend to solve the below issues.
Usage of insecticide for agriculture has a destructive effect of the soil.
The existing method of using body-mounted hand-pump based system is inefficient in terms of
- Insecticide quantity used
- Sqaure area of land covered
The ineffieciency is are dependent of the factors below
- Human error
- Wind direction
- Distance between plants
- Height of plants
- Type of plants viz., large leaf, small leaf
- Spray Nozzle
On a conservative method/approach, the insecticide is sprayed ineffectively over an area due to human error or field of view. The error is could a due to a combination of factors viz.,
- Fatigue
- region of interest as a small dense area, cumbersome to traverse
- Reduced plant to plant coverage due to height of plants