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Agriculture
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Application of UAVs in Precision Agriculture—2nd Edition
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Application of UAVs in Precision Agriculture—2nd Edition

A special issue of Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472). This special issue belongs to the section "Digital Agriculture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 July 2024 | Viewed by 1849

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Jiyu Li

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Engineering, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China
Interests: UAV rotor airflow; airflow operation; agricultural drone; UAV energy and payload; drone; UAV; UAV architecture design; airflow control; airflow strength; flight control; operation route planning; agricultural sensor; drone operation effect; UAV operation efficiency
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Jiating Li

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
Interests: precision and digital agriculture; UAV; image processing; spectroscopy; machine and deep learning; radiative transfer model; high-throughput plant phenotyping
Dr. Suiyuan Shen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Engineering, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China
Interests: flight control system design; flight simulation technology; flight dynamics; aerodynamics of rotorcraft; intelligent control algorithm; overall design of novel configuration aircraft

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The use of agricultural UAVs has become an essential part of modern agriculture due to their high operational efficiency. The key elements of agricultural UAVs include rotor-motors, airframe architecture, airflow distribution, sensors, operational components, and control systems, all of which have complex and multidimensional interactions that affect the operational effectiveness of agricultural UAVs. Therefore, current research on agricultural drone operations is rapidly developing in the direction of simulation calculation, environmental perception, multidimensional control, and precision operations. This not only improves the performance of agricultural drones in remote sensing, spraying, sowing, and pollination but also demonstrates their capabilities in more traditional agricultural fields.

This Special Issue is a natural continuation of our previous Special Issue, titled “Application of UAVs in Precision Agriculture”. The focus of this Special Issue is on simulation calculation, environmental perception, multidimensional control, and precision operations. The theme of this Special Issue is “Improving the operational effectiveness of agricultural UAVs,” covering interdisciplinary research in agriculture, biology, electronics, engineering, and other fields. Operational drones in various applications, such as orchards, fields, cash crops, and ecosystems, all fall within the scope of this Special Issue. We welcome the submission of various types of articles, such as original research papers and reviews.

Prof. Dr. Jiyu Li
Dr. Jiating Li
Dr. Suiyuan Shen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • agricultural UAVs
  • effects of operation
  • efficiency of operation
  • route planning
  • energy-consumption matching
  • variable spray
  • drift suppression
  • deposition of droplets

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

25 pages, 15202 KiB  
Article
Research on the Effect Characteristics of Free-Tail Layout Parameters on Tail-Sitter VTOL UAVs
by Hao Qi, Shi-Jie Cao, Jia-Yue Wu, Yi-Ming Peng, Hong Nie and Xiao-Hui Wei
Agriculture 2024, 14(3), 472; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14030472 - 15 Mar 2024
Viewed by 632
Abstract
The tail-sitter VTOL UAV boasts not only high-speed cruising and air hovering capabilities, but also its unique tail-sitting vertical takeoff and landing and hovering attitude enable aerial operations with an exceptionally small cross-sectional area. This feature effectively broadens the scope of application for [...] Read more.
The tail-sitter VTOL UAV boasts not only high-speed cruising and air hovering capabilities, but also its unique tail-sitting vertical takeoff and landing and hovering attitude enable aerial operations with an exceptionally small cross-sectional area. This feature effectively broadens the scope of application for the UAV in intelligent agriculture, encompassing tasks such as agricultural inspection, production monitoring, and topographic mapping. Given the necessity for frequent modal transitions, this paper is grounded in a thorough examination of the typical structural characteristics of the tail-sitter VTOL UAV. A comprehensive technical solution for tail-sitter VTOL UAVs, based on the free-tail configuration, is proposed in this paper. The free-tail structure is utilized to address the limitations of traditional tailless layout and fixed landing gear in terms of flight stability and takeoff/landing performance of tail-sitter VTOL UAVs. However, the implementation of this solution necessitates the addition of a new maneuvering unit. Consequently, this paper delves into the aerodynamic coupling characteristics and laws between the layout parameters such as tail number, tail length, and tail area and the tail-sitter VTOL UAV fuselage. To optimize the free-tail configuration, a multi-objective optimization is performed by integrating the overall UAV dynamics, landing dynamics, and modal transition trajectory constraints. The results of stability modeling simulations and flight tests demonstrate that the tail-sitter VTOL UAV equipped with this technical solution exhibits enhanced maneuverability and flight efficiency compared to the conventional tailless layout. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of UAVs in Precision Agriculture—2nd Edition)
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19 pages, 7359 KiB  
Article
Complex Habitat Deconstruction and Low-Altitude Remote Sensing Recognition of Tobacco Cultivation on Karst Mountainous
by Youyan Huang, Lihui Yan, Zhongfa Zhou, Denghong Huang, Qianxia Li, Fuxianmei Zhang and Lu Cai
Agriculture 2024, 14(3), 411; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14030411 - 3 Mar 2024
Viewed by 755
Abstract
Rapidly and accurately extracting tobacco plant information can facilitate tobacco planting management, precise fertilization, and yield prediction. In the karst mountainous of southern China, tobacco plant identification is affected by large ground undulations, fragmented planting areas, complex and diverse habitats, and uneven plant [...] Read more.
Rapidly and accurately extracting tobacco plant information can facilitate tobacco planting management, precise fertilization, and yield prediction. In the karst mountainous of southern China, tobacco plant identification is affected by large ground undulations, fragmented planting areas, complex and diverse habitats, and uneven plant growth. This study took a tobacco planting area in Guizhou Province as the research object and used DJI UAVs to collect UAV visible light images. Considering plot fragmentation, plant size, presence of weeds, and shadow masking, this area was classified into eight habitats. The U-Net model was trained using different habitat datasets. The results show that (1) the overall precision, recall, F1-score, and Intersection over Union (IOU) of tobacco plant information extraction were 0.68, 0.85, 0.75, and 0.60, respectively. (2) The precision was the highest for the subsurface-fragmented and weed-free habitat and the lowest for the smooth-tectonics and weed-infested habitat. (3) The weed-infested habitat with smaller tobacco plants can blur images, reducing the plant-identification accuracy. This study verified the feasibility of the U-Net model for tobacco single-plant identification in complex habitats. Decomposing complex habitats to establish the sample set method is a new attempt to improve crop identification in complex habitats in karst mountainous areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of UAVs in Precision Agriculture—2nd Edition)
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