Videos

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Data Revolution in Precision Agriculture

Presenter
October 26, 2017
Abstract
Agricultural technology is changing at such a rapid pace that new technologies become outdated in 2-3 years. This technology revolution has expanded the scope of precision agriculture beyond what we imagined, even 10 years ago. Currently, agriculture is faced with a data revolution brought forth by UAS primarily, but also by other technologies such as telematics. The recent MarketinsigtsReports forecasts that the agriculture drone market will reach $4.2 B by 2022. The NDSU team has been focusing on developing applications of UAS that can provide value to agricultural producers in the last 4 years. We dealt with small and large UAS and a variety of sensors, and the data generated by these systems. This talk will focus on specific applications of UAS in agriculture that has great potential, and discuss the data challenge (transfer, storage, analytics and sharing) our team has faced. The current bottlenecks in UAS adoption in agriculture include difficulties in data transfer and development of actionable intelligence from the data. Irrespective of these challenges, precision agriculture that combines big data and robotics will be the only type of agriculture we will have in the future.