Introduction

Agricultural drone is efficient, safe, economical, and environment friendly, and are one of the best choices of modern precision agriculture production operations.

The agricultural drone is mainly composing of three parts: a flight platform, a flight control system, and a spraying system.

Agricultural drones are unmanned aircraft used for pesticide spraying and other agricultural and forestry plant operations.

They could spray through ground remote control or GPS flight control.

They can spray drugs, seeds, powders, foliar fertilizer, etc., or by carrying different task systems, operations such as prediction of agricultural diseases and insect pests, real-time monitoring, counting of fruit trees, and monitoring of animal husbandry.

The flight platform could divide into fixed-wing type, single-rotor type, and multi-rotor type according to the drone structure.

Fixed-wing drones have the characteristics of strength endurance, heavy load, fast flight, and high efficiency.

They are mostly used for farmland information collection and farmland remote sensing, and could also using for agriculture, forestry, and plant protection operations.

Use ultra-low altitude flight during operation, 5-7 meters away from the crop canopy.

Fixed-wing drones cannot hover and have a large turning radius and are easily affected by obstacles such as telephone poles and tall trees in the field.

They have high environmental requirements in the operating area and are mostly used in open and flat farmland areas.

Rotary-wing drones have weak endurance, moderate load and flight speed, can take off and land vertically,

and have low requirements for take-off and landing sites.

Rotor-wing drones are more flexible in flight operations, can hover in the air, are less affected by the surrounding environment,

and are suitable for farmland areas with more complex environments.

The multi-rotor type is easier to control and more stable than the single-rotor type,

but it is weaker than the single-rotor type in terms of load capacity and endurance.

The flight control system consists of a gyroscope (flight attitude perception), accelerometer, geomagnetic induction, air pressure sensor (hover control), GPS module, and control circuit.

The main function is to automatically maintain the aircraft's normal flight attitude.

The operator can also specify the spraying route map through the GPS system to determine the spraying flight route of the agricultural drone to avoid respray and miss spray.

The spray system mainly includes a medicine box, a spray bar, and a nozzle.

Due to the limited load of the drone, the spraying liquid will drift during the flight.

It is necessary to develop a lightweight,

low resistance, anti-surge medicine tank, and a series of aviation-specific controllable nozzles with a narrow droplet spectrum and low drift, improve the adhesion rate of the drug solution on the target.

The agricultural drone has two driving modes:

oil-driven and electric-driven, and electric-driven are suitable for small-scale planting areas.

Oil-driven agricultural drones rely on fuel to provide power and are superior to electric plant protection drones powered by lithium batteries in terms of endurance,

load capacity, and power cost. Electric-driven drones have more advantages in terms of overall machine cost, maintenance requirements, and ease of operation.

Oil-driven drones account for a very low proportion:

according to industry insiders, since the mainland drone industry is mainly concentrating on consumer-grade drones,

it has formed a relatively complete industrial structure and technology accumulation.

There are many electric-driven drones, the technology and design are very similar to consumer drones,

and many flight control platforms have also been open source, and the barriers to design and manufacturing are lower.

Oil-driven agricultural drones have a load of 10-45kgs, which is a gap between consumer drones and manned aircraft.

There are no ready-made teaching materials for research and development,

and they are all trying and exploring, which is relatively more difficult.

At present, most of the agricultural drones on the market are electric-driven,

and oil-driven agricultural drones account for only about 3%.

The oil-driven agricultural drone is suitable for large-scale planting areas, and the electric-driven type is suitable for small-scale planting areas:

the oil-driven agricultural drone has better endurance, load capacity, and higher operating requirements, and is suitable for high-level intensive and large-scale planting such as large-scale farms;

electric-driven drones are suitable for small-scale planting areas with low intensiveness, such as hilly areas where agricultural and forestry planting is relatively scattering.

Agricultural drones are highly efficient, safe, economical, and environment friendly, easy to operate, and have significant advantages.

Compared with the widely used manual knapsack sprayer for agricultural production operations,

agricultural drones have overwhelming advantages in terms of efficiency, safety, control effect, and economy.

High efficiency:

the average person can only spray 15 ~ 20 acres a day by hand,

while an agricultural drone can spray 1-2 acres per minute, spray hundreds of acres a day, which is far more efficient than manual operation.

Safety:

the pesticide application personnel operate by operating the agricultural drone to avoid direct contact with pesticides,

so that the human body is not susceptible to drugs, and to avoid poisoning and heatstroke.

Environmental protection:

the use of agricultural drones can save 30%-50% of pesticide usage and 90% of water consumption.

Good control effect:

the use of agricultural drones for pesticide application can ensure that the amount of pesticide used in each area is controllable, and there will be no more or less spray.

In addition, the downward airflow generated by the drone's rotor tumbling and shaking the crops at the same time forms a turbulent area between the crops below,

which can evenly compress the liquid medicine on all levels of the crops, and the pesticides can penetrate into the crops with the airflow,

the roots of the leaves and the back of the leaves could make pests nowhere to escape, and the control effect could increase by 15%-35%.

The economic advantage is obvious:

the whole drone has a long service life, in addition to the cost of liquid medicine, the energy cost is very low, and it can also reduce the cost of pesticides and water.

Compared with hiring manpower for agriculture operations, the cost per acre of using agricultural drones could save by more than 50%.

Simple operation:

easy to learn and use, the operator only needs 10-15 days of training to learn the flying pesticide application operation and daily maintenance of the agricultural drone;

the agricultural drone only needs to carry the pesticide vertically in the field take-off and landing, the operation is flexible and convenient;

adding medicine and changing the battery is convenient and quick, and the replacement and installation of plant protection agents and batteries could complete in a few minutes.

Satisfying special needs:

Malaysia and Indonesia are the world’s two largest palm oil producers.

The planting area of palm trees in Malaysia accounts for more than half of the country’s arable land, over 5 million hectares.

The prevention and control of palm tree pests and diseases are particularly important, and it is particularly important for oil palm plantations.

The spraying requirement is different from that of paddy rice.

It needs to be sprayed tree by tree, sometimes a lot of pesticides need to pour from the top of the tree.

At this time, agricultural drones can meet this special need.