Remote Sensing for Agricultural Crops Based on a Low Cost Quadcopter

This paper presents a proposal for information gathering from crops by means of a low-cost quadcopter known as the AR Drone 2.0. To achieve this, we designed a system for remote sensing that addresses challenges identified in the present research, such as acquisition of aerial photographs of an entire crop and AR Drone navigation on non-planar areas arises. The project is currently at an early stage of development. The first stage describes platform and hardware/software tools used to build the proposed prototype. Second stage characterizes performance experiments of sensors stability and altitude in AR Drone, in order to design an altitude strategy control over non-flat crops. In addition, path planning algorithms based on shortest route by graphs (Dijkstra, A* and wavefront propagation) are evaluated with simulated quadcopter. The implementation of the shortest path algorithms is the beginning to full coverage of a crop. Observations of quadcopter behavior in Gazebo simulator and real tests demonstrate viability to execute the project by using AR Drone like platform of a remote sensing system to precision agriculture.