Environmental Monitoring and Agricultural Mapping Drone by Chetan Velamurugan and Udayan Umapathi
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) or Drones, in popular parlance are quickly moving from the battle field to the common man's hands. Drones have untapped commercial use and their potential benefits range from monitoring crop health, aerial surveying and delivering vaccines to remote parts. The rapid development and growth of UAV's as a remote sensing platform and advances in sensor technology are catalyzing a renaissance in remote sensing, varying across fields including Environmental Monitoring, Atmospheric Research and Agriculture.The drone that we have developed is a multipurpose drone. It serves as a generic UAV platform capable of autonomous waypoint navigation. It would carry an array of sensors like CO2, Temperature, Humidty, etc. for Environmental Monitoring and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) Cameras, Multispectral Cameras, etc. for Agricultural use cases. The benefits arising from the data collected by the drone would give us real time insights of the target farm at any particular time. Crop surveillance by drones can drastically increase farm crop yields while minimizing cost.