Development of an Autonomous Agricultural Drone and Real - Time Monitoring Interface for Aerial Seeding

Abstract

Applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or commonly known as drones, have been considerably growing during the past few decades in various fields such as agriculture, aerial mapping, surveillance, disaster management, and military applications. Drones are used in agriculture to monitor, harvest, and apply pesticides and fertilizers [1]. An autonomous agricultural drone (quadrotor) was developed for aerial seeding and a web interface using IoT technology with a raspberry pi microcontroller. A lowcost and open-source flight controller was used [2]. The real-time unmanned aerial vehicle monitoring system was developed using PHP/MySQL as the backend technologies on the website and Bootstrap, AJAX, JQuery for the frontend and to communicate with the Pixhawk and Raspberry Pi, Python was used. To enhance the continuous flying time with load, proper weight calculations were done before it flies with the load. CAD software was used to design the drone from the top, bottom, right and left views with exact calculations [3]. The design calculations, along with thrust values, also calculated for payload.