Use of remotely piloted aircraft in precision agriculture: a review

Abstract

The objective of this review was to examine the current use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) in obtaining data to assist in the application of precision farming techniques and to exemplify successful situations of technology use. The RPA has applications for monitoring, mapping, vegetation index (VI) extraction, volume, plant height, among others, and has been studied in several agricultural crops, being support for decision making on agrochemical application, planting failure, accompaniment of growth favoring the increase of crop productivity. One of the potentialities evaluated through RPA is the use of VI, which may be extracted from digital images obtained by cameras that contain only the visible band. It may be an alternative for farmers who do not have access to RPA coupled with high-tech embedded sensors. Therefore, it is a tool that may contribute to the decision making, allowing the acquisition of high spatial and temporal resolution images.