Udupi: SMVITM students invent farmer-friendly Agricopter

By Anil Belle
Bellevision Media Network

Udupi, 02 Jun 2017: Agriculture is one of the primary sectors which have the direct implications on our country’s economy. In this age of ever dwindling natural resources like water, air, fertile soil for agriculture as well as non-availability of manual labor has made farming activities a liability for a farmer rather than considering it as source of income. To make this sector more farmers friendly and for the judicious use of natural resources for farming a technological intervention is of utmost important.

 

Precision agriculture (PA) or UAV farming Drone is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. The goal of Precision Agriculture research is to define a Decision Support System (DSS) for farm management with the goal of optimizing returns on inputs while preserving resources. To make Precision Agriculture cost effective, low cost aerial camera platform named Agricopter was developed. The unmanned drone gives the flight plan that covers the field. The drone covers the field in pattern while taking pictures with special cameras. After landing, the processing is done to interpret the amount of light reflected in different wavelengths. Healthier plants reflect in near-infrared than visible when it is captured by camera. Processing this data makes the area of healthy growth standout than the poor area of growth or stressed plants easier to identify. By hovering the drone over the agricultural field of interest the plant count can be obtained which helps the farmer in understanding the healthy growth of plants. More manual labour intensive activities such as seed spraying, pesticide spraying can be easily done with the help of drone.

 

 

The real time agriculture field survey required for this project was conducted at NBAIR (National Bureau of Agricultural Insect Resources) and GKVK (Gandhi Krishi Vignana Kendra), Bengaluru to check the health and obtain the count of the Paddy crop, Brinjal and Sunflower plants.

 

The Agricopter project has great societal impact for the farming activities in India which will help in checking the health of plant, obtain plant count, seed spraying and pesticide spraying which is highly recommended in manual labour deficient agricultural sector.

 

This project has bagged many accolades in various competitions such as ‘IIOT-2K16: State Level Inter-Collegiate Model Competition’ held at SMVITM, Bantakal, ‘TechPrints-5.0, National Level Paper Presentation’ Competition held at SJEC, Mangaluru, ‘Innovata-2K17: State Level Inter-Collegiate Model Competition,’ organized at SDMIT, Ujire.

 

Kuldeep Rao, Shwetha H, Sindhu Rani, M Priyanka Wagle final year Computer Science Students of Shri Madhwa Vadiraja Institute of Technology (SMVITM), Bantakal, Udupi carried out this project under the guidance of Manoj T, Assistant Professor, department of CSE, SMVITM.