Aerial Green Vision Using Quadcopter Pesticide Sprayer Drones: A Third Eye for Farmers

This chapter covers the various applications of computer vision and drone technology in agriculture. The idea is to present a variety of applications, such as the segmentation and classification of plant diseases; crop monitoring; grade and quality estimation of fruits, flowers, vegetables, and crops; surveillance; estimation of soil deficiency; estimation of crop and plant growth; canopy measurement; management of water stress; calculation of vegetation indices; weed detection; and spraying, among others. The modernization of unmanned aerial vehicles and high-end computing equipment has made it possible to automate many of the agricultural sector’s customary processes. Drones have become an effective tool for precision agriculture, with uses in crop monitoring, yield estimation, and pesticide spraying. The technology for improved quadcopter pesticide sprayer drones is presented in this chapter together with the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). NDVI maps are created by our system’s processing of images of crops taken with a multispectral camera. With the use of these maps, crop stress points can be located and treated with pesticides. To make sure that the pesticide is delivered uniformly, we also devised a technique for autonomously managing the drone’s flying path.