Artículos de revistas
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles and wireless sensor networks for spraying pesticides
Fecha
2014-04Registro en:
Journal of Systems Architecture, Amsterdam, v.60, n.4, p.393-404, 2014
10.1016/j.sysarc.2014.01.004
Autor
Faiçal, Bruno Squizato
Costa, Fausto Guzzo da
Pessin, Gustavo
Ueyama, Jo
Vieira, Heitor de Freitas
Colombo, Alexandre
Fini, Pedro Henrique
Villas, Leandro Aparecido
Osório, Fernando Santos
Vargas, Patrícia Amâncio
Braun, Torsten
Institución
Resumen
The application of pesticides and fertilizers in agricultural areas is of crucial importance for crop yields. The use of aircrafts is becoming increasingly common in carrying out this task mainly because of their speed and effectiveness in the spraying operation. However, some factors may reduce the yield, or even cause damage (e.g., crop areas not covered in the spraying process, overlapping spraying of crop areas, applying pesticides on the outer edge of the crop). Weather conditions, such as the intensity and direction of the wind while spraying, add further complexity to the problem of maintaining control. In this paper, we describe an architecture to address the problem of self-adjustment of the UAV routes when spraying chemicals in a crop field. We propose and evaluate an algorithm to adjust the UAV route to changes in wind intensity and direction. The algorithm to adapt the path runs in the UAV and its input is the feedback obtained from the wireless sensor network (WSN) deployed in the crop field. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of the number of communication messages between the UAV and the WSN. The results show that the use of the feedback information from the sensors to make adjustments to the routes could significantly reduce the waste of pesticides and fertilizers.