Commercial use of drones in farms and other agriculture
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Hii am building a hexacopter with1.) hobbywing x8 motors2.) flight controller pixhawk PX53.) battery 12s 22Ah4.) wheel base of around 1800mm5.) estimated weight around 17kg without payloadi am looking if anyone has already tuned this type so i can get a head start. looking forwardthank youMike
Read more…Agricultural drones have gone from being questioned by the market to being actively promoted by the government, from tens of thousands to thousands of dollars. Behind this is the rise of technology in the entire industry. However, the degree of promotion of agricultural drones varies greatly in different regions. What do you think of the application of agricultural drones in your country?https://youtu.be/TDTW9TsvjZw EFT agricultrul drone solution
Read more…I'm leading a project to develop a completely open source system for deploying artificial intelligence and computer vision on a drone. We are trying to make the system as general purpose as possible, but one application would be supporting precision agricultural. The real-time, in-flight processing aspects of the payload are probably less interesting for precision AG, but the data collection and curation capabilities might be. We are getting started with a few specific missions, we are…
Read more…I am looking for a 2 Axis Gimbal for a fixed wing., SkyWalker X-8The camera only needs stabilization just for one Axis unless anyone has better idea.Needs to be low profile.Any suggestions?
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David.. I am not sold on anything.. well outside of buying a MaxMax camera to play with.. and as a software dev, I have a tendency to tinker and code.. especially if I don't like what the company provides for imaging processing. However.. I would be interested in whatever works... $3800 might be a bit high for some precision farmer... but like most things.. it if has results then it can be expensed as this is all a business.
I have a tendency to think that with some sort of calibration target/card that you capture from the altitude you are flying and the camera settings that you are using.. I would think that there would be some way to baseline/calibrate the maxmax camera data that you captured.. which you likely should/would need to do with the Tetracam one, since a lot has to do with time of day, and other environmental factors of the day of your flight. I haven't explored if this is even possible but seems like it could be.. since the calibration card would have known NIR, R, G, B elements.
I would love to take a look at some of that Tetracam TIF outputs and what algorithms people use as they would be different from the NIR-G-B cameras... is that something you could share with me? especially if you also have the NDVI colorized output from whatever GIS app. I would love to bake in the ability to use more then just MaxMax cameras to do this sort of analysis... MaxMax just happened to be at a price point I could play with.
Martin.. there has been no mention of crop dusters in this forum.
LanMark, you bring up some very excellent points.
-The Tetracam ADC cameras output RAW format images that contain reflectance information for the Green, Red, and Near-Infrared bands. By not performing onboard jpeg compression, like I am guessing the MaxMax does, you are preserving a more true representation of the canopy reflectance. The software included with the Tetracam cameras uses a color processing file specific to each camera (made from a calibration standard) to convert the RAW images into Color Infrared TIFs, or whatever standard format you would like.
-I personally have not used MaxMax cameras but they are definitely a cheaper alternative that I would be interested in learning more about. I do get a little nervous flying a $3800 camera around, but they are very robust since they have no moving parts (i have heard of people really crashing the Tetracam cameras hard with no damage).
-For 90% of ag applications, a 3.2 megapixel camera flying from 400-1000ft agl will produce higher resolution data than can be effectively used. Wide angle lenses are bad for remote sensing applications...the ADC cameras use 8mm lenses giving a 44 by 34 deg field of view.
-For Directed Scouting applications (aka the imagery is only being used to indicate where potential problems might be) the actual pixel or NDVI values are not so critical. I would however be hesitant to derive a prescription map from a non-remote sensing grade camera systems since the pixel values are going to affect a chemical rate applied. Also the benefit of having good absolute NDVI values is that you can compare imagery taken on different days throughout the growing season.
I am very impressed by the software application you wrote, it looks like it could bring a lot of additional value to the MaxMax cameras
Eric I friend requested you.. as I would love to get some more insights on the consumer side of it all.. the maxmax.com cameras are in the $700 price range.. I got the modified Canon SX230HS.. which has its own gps.. I figure even if the GPS wasn't all that great I could at least get great timestamps on the imagery without having to sync the camera's clock.
Anyway I will be more chatty privately as I tend to ramble on.. but I think people like you are looking for something they can do that isn't all that expensive and provides an alternative to walking the crops.. but allows them some decent way to detect problem areas to investigate in person and with other equipment..
Do you guys do precision farming? There are all sorts of fun stuff you can do with GPS-enabled equipment.. I have no idea how to generate the data that those things consume.... yet.
LanMark,
I'm new to the UAV scene but am currently building a quad with APM and my brother is working on a plane with autopilot as well. We should have a decent setup for taking some images of our crops this year to start to get in on this.
We farm just over 3000 acres, mostly irrigated, in Alberta, Canada. We aren't 100% sure how much use we'll get out of aerial images but are into the UAV hobby anyways, and are always looking for ways to improve our day jobs (farming).
Approx what price range are you talking for a MaxMax.com camera capable of taking the types of images you are working with on your custom MaxMax software? And will you be needing testers for your software? Or at the very least we could possibly send you some images in the future of our actual fields to play with if you need more source files.
I agree with your statement about this not being an exact science. Most farmers have a good routine for crop production including walking the fields, and aren't going to be replacing their current systems anytime soon, but more information is never a bad thing. Most farmers also generally have a good idea of the problem areas in their fields, but having more detailed and documented information is also a good idea.
A trending tool is exactly what we need. Eventually it would be nice to have an overlay of our entire farm for every year on GoogleEarth or something so we could easily monitor poor areas over time. I guess eventually more than once a year would be great, but it would take some time to cover our entire operation more than once a year....
Anyways, very interested to get involved in the conversation!
Eric
Awesome stuff Keeyen... love the airfoil you guys have on your site from Germany.
David can you explain the advantages of using one of the Tetracam's over say a modified camera that MaxMax has? At $3800 the camera for a lot of people is out of their price range especially to fly on something that could easily crash... and at 3.2MP camera sensor it seems rather high. I also am not sure what sort of output you get with these cameras since most image handling/processing is to a RGB spec not a 4 channel output.
I don't work for maxmax or anything but have seen some pretty amazing results at a fraction of the price.. or a price that you don't freak out at thinking that the thing could fall out of the sky and ruin a 3800 dollar camera.
The 3.2MP sensor seems for the price seems problematic for doing large coverage areas.
So I was wondering if you could shed some light on the advantages of the equipment you resell.. and if you could justify the $3200 price difference. I think most of the consumers of the NDVI data would using it more for a trending tool and way to point out problem areas then an exact science / accurate ndvi indexing... or at least seems like it.
I'm very great to joint this group. UAV will be very useful especially in the area of remote sensing. I'm involve in aerial mapping for our local oil palm plantation, here is a job that I've done. At the moment I'm only use RGB images for geo ref othomosiac and DEM. Eventually I would like to explore the NIR.
Hello everyone. I am glad to see there is so much interest in using UAS for agriculture. I am a very experienced user of Tetracam products and I have a business reselling their multispectral cameras along with some unique add-on that tag all the images automatically with position and attitude data. Please checkout our website for more information. We also co-host workshops with Tetracam about 4 times per year that walk attendees through the process of capturing images, verifying coverage, and creating color infrared orthomosaics along with NDVI plots. We have done studies and the Tetracam ADC Lite produces NDVI results very comparable to Landsat. I look forward to seeing this industry develop and hope we can help others get involved. www.fieldofviewllc.com
Right now the functionality that exists for consuming imagery from the modified MaxMax.com camera. I am not experienced in the workflow and requirements above the image processing.. but definitely want to bake in as much functionality in a specialized tool that moves the adoption of UAVs in agriculture.
Some of the GIS tools are just outside of the price range that a typical crop specialist can afford of a precision farmer... so hopefully I can figure out what these sorts of people need and work it in. So yeah I would love as much data as you guys have and hear your stories on the inputs and outputs and how you go about producing the valuable data.
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