USE OF DRONE IN AGRICULTURE

THEORY AND PRACTICAL TOPICS COVERED:

Day 1: Introduction and Overview of course with Tools, Planning, and Legal Compliance

• Introduction to Drone Applications in Agriculture.

• Overview of Spraying, and Crop Health Analysis.

• Introduction to Agricultural Drones : Types and Capabilities

• Showcasing the benefits of using drones over traditional methods.

• Regulations and Safety Protocols in Agricultural Drone Operations

• Different sensors and payloads for data collection for crop health analysis.

• Categorization of drones based on weight, purpose, and capabilities.

• Understanding and managing battery safety life of drone when we do seed and spraying.

• Drones suitable for pesticide spraying with their payloads, Nozzle selection and calibration.

• Accessories, understanding of software used for flying drones such as mission planner and how it works.

Day 2: Precision Agriculture and Crop Monitoring Using Drone Data & Its Insights

• Detailed of precision agriculture and crop monitoring

• Importance of terrain variation while spraying and capturing data for any field.

• Basics of remote sensing and its applications, Electromagnetic spectrum and its fundamentals.

• Importance of Spectral reflectance and image interpretation keys.

• Different resolutions used in remote sensing and importance for each application.

• Introduction to vegetation indices and their applications in agriculture.

• Understanding the concept of reflectance and how it relates to plant health.

• Exploring common vegetation indices such as NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index)

Day 3: Advanced Flight Techniques with Conducting seed sowing and spraying missions on field

• Drone flight principles and controls.

• Points considered in Pre-flight checklists and procedures.

• Basic drone piloting skills and manoeuvres for spraying.

• Practical session on integrating and calibrating payloads with drones.

• Weight Distribution: Understanding how payload weight affects flight dynamics.

• Flight Adjustments: Modifying flight patterns to accommodate payload weight.

• Safe Delivery: Techniques for releasing or delivering payloads safely.

• Configure the drone to adjust spray rate based on location and crop requirements.

• Test variable rate application functionality before flying.

Day 4: Vegetation data processing techniques with terminologies of photogrammetry.

• Overview of photogrammetry, Principles of aerial photography.

• Important technical terms used in photogrammetry to understand and interpret data captured.

• How relief displacement is removed from orthorectified image.

• Stereoscopic vision and depth perception to generate 3D model.

• Data collection, management, and data processing structural workflow for drone data processing.

• Ground sampling distance(GSD) and its importance in drone data capturing.

• Different steps of processing data sets in software and multispectral datasets.

Day 5: Hands on data processing for given datasets and map preparation with basic GIS

• Transferring the captured imagery and sensor data from the drone team to a processing system.

• Geotagging of data.

• Understand sequential workflow of data processing in processing software.

• Generating Orthomosaic maps from captured aerial images.

• Preparation of DSM & DTM to facilitate interpretation and decision-making.

• Interpreting and visualizing vegetation index maps.

• Data export and integration with GIS data extraction.

• Identifying and extracting relevant features from the imagery, such as plant health indices or crop growth patterns.

• Field mapping includes elevation information that allows farmers to find any irregularities.