Precision Agriculture / Inspection
Precision technology has driven the farming revolution of recent years, monitoring crops from the sky will drive the next.
With a drone or UAV you can capture highly accurate images in various color spectrums of your fields, covering up to hundreds of hectares/acres in a single flight.
Inspection of structures with drones
Using drones for simple and efficient structure analysis is a cost-saving and safer task than manual examination. With cameras installed of up to 40 megapixels, bridges, roofs, facades, windows and other structures can be examined with considerable ease and in a shorter time. Damage caused by erosion, aging of concrete and corrosion are clearly visible from the air.
Yearly inspections can be well documented and analysed with hig-resolution images.
Technical structures as bridges, chimneys, cellphone towers can be examined during operation and without any risk to regular persons doing inspection.
Thermographic Images of Structures
Miami Aerial has access to specific thermal image cameras to obtain detects and leaks from a buildings roof insulation as thermal losses can be visualized with thermography. With specific radiometric cameras we can quickly identify large temperature differences while selecting an area and showing temperature measurements directly at the camera.
Advanced Farming with Drone Technology
The goal of precision agriculture is to more efficiently apply a farm’s limited resources to gain maximum yield. A primary method for doing that is to minimize variability of crop health within and across fields. To learn more about precision agriculture, read this excellent overview published by The Economist.
Data Collection & Data Processing
Due to its nature, precision agriculture requires a LOT of data to work. The three main types of data include:
- geo-tagged images: visible and multi-spectral aerial images taken of fields, over time; this is where drones play
- equipment performance: real time feedback & logs provided by sensor-equipped manned and unmanned equipment such as seeders, spreaders, tractors and combines
- management data: crop yield and other data provided by farm operators
- plant height
- plant count
- plant health
- presence of nutrients
- presence of weeds
- presence of disease
- relative biomass estimates
- 3D / volumetric data (piles, patches, holes and hills)
- Crop Health Monitoring
- Crop Scouting
- Nitrogen Recommendation
- Yield Monitoring
- Aerial photos with GPS location information
- Plant Stress Monitoring
- Drought Assessment
- Tree Classification
- Leaf Area Indexing
Drones are used to gather a variety of image-based data about the condition of crops – including:
Examples of how Drone data is used:
Drone data can either being separately analyzed or for quick action, or the generated orthomosaic images can be fed into an agricultural programs like SMS by Ag Leader, SST Summit®, FarmRite®, Stratus®, Sirrus®” or other software tools to create prescription maps.