Preliminary Design of a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System for Crop-Spraying on Vineyards

This paper describes the preliminary design of an innovative concept rotary-wing Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) for precision agriculture and aerial spraying applications. Aerial spraying of plant protection products and pesticides shows open challenges in terms of performance and regulatory requirements. In particular*the focus here is on highlighting the advantages of the proposed solution in performing precise and expeditious interventions, coping with the spray drift problem (i.e. minimization of drift). Flight performances and agronomists' requirements are combined to define the mission and the aerial vehicle and spray system design

Advancements of Spraying Technology in Agriculture

Plant protection activities are most important practices during crop production. Application of maximum pesticide products with the sprayer. The application of fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides is one of the most recurrent and significant tasks in agriculture. Conventional agricultural spraying techniques have made the inconsistency between economic growth and environmental protection in agricultural production. Spraying techniques continuously developed in recent decades. For pesticide application, it is not the only sprayer that is essential, but all the parameters like the type and area of the plant canopy, area of a plant leaf, height of the crop, and volume of plants related to plant protection product applications are very important for obtaining better results. From this point of view, the advancement in agriculture sprayer has been started in last few decades. Robotics and automatic spraying technologies like variable rate sprayers, UAV sprayers, and electrostatic sprayers are growing to Increase the utilization rate of pesticides, reduce pesticide residues, real-time, cost-saving, high compatibility of plant protection products application. These technologies are under the “umbrella” of precision agriculture. The mechanized spraying system, usually implemented by highly precise equipment or mobile robots, which, makes possible the selective targeting of pesticide application on desire time and place. These advanced spraying technologies not only reduces the labour cost but also effective in environmental protection. Researchers are conducting experimental studies on the design, development and testing of precision spraying technologies for crops and orchards

Design of Plant Protection UAV Variable Spray System Based on Neural Networks

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly emerged as a new technology in the fields of plant protection and pest control in China. Based on existing variable spray research, a plant protection UAV variable spray system integrating neural network based decision making is designed. Using the existing data on plant protection UAV operations, combined with artificial neural network (ANN) technology, an error back propagation (BP) neural network model between the factors affecting droplet deposition is trained. The factors affecting droplet deposition include ambient temperature, ambient humidity, wind speed, flight speed, flight altitude, propeller pitch, nozzles pitch and prescription value. Subsequently, the BP neural network model is combined with variable rate spray control for plant protection UAVs, and real-time information is collected by multi-sensor. The deposition rate is determined by the neural network model, and the flow rate of the spray system is regulated according to the predicted deposition amount. The amount of droplet deposition can meet the prescription requirement. The results show that the training variance of the ANN is 0.003, and thus, the model is stable and reliable. The outdoor tests show that the error between the predicted droplet deposition and actual droplet deposition is less than 20%. The ratio of droplet deposition to prescription value in each unit is approximately equal, and a variable spray operation under different conditions is realized