Last December, India introduced guidelines to legalize the use of flying drones across various sectors. And already there's an innovative application for drone technology.
Students of Lovely Professional University have designed 'Flying Farmer', a drone that can be exclusively deployed in farming and field survey.
Flying Farmer Drone
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The 'Flying Farmer'?is a wireless, sensor device?that can be used in mapping and survey of yields and biomass. It estimates the nutrient content of the soil to aid production growth and reduce crop damage.
The Flying Farmer drone project required the contribution of 45 students and 5 faculty members from the Electronics, Mechanical and Agricultural Engineering department of the university.
REUTERS / representational image
The 'Flying Farmer' is designed to solve two major agricultural issues faced by farmers - pesticide treatment and weed detection.
With rising labour costs and shortage of labour, drone technology is hypothesized to replace human intervention in delivering pesticide treatment. Pre-programmed drones can target specific farm areas and crops to deliver pesticides, avoiding wastage and over use of pesticides.
REUTERS / representational image
Secondly, human weed detection is inefficient and prone to error, leading to lower produce. Drones, programmed with computer vision algorithms and infrared sensors can detect the exact position and nature of weeds and transmit information to the farmer for timely action. The field trials conducted at LPU led to an improvement of 15-20% in produce quantity.
The University claims that it will not file for a patent but instead open source the technology so that it can be inexpensively available to any farmer, anywhere.
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