Tuning of a Terrain Following Remotely Piloted Aircraft System for Crop Monitoring in Precision Agriculture

Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) are very promising in environmental monitoring and they has a very high technological level to apply them in reconnaissance mission with an high level of automation in order to reduce the workload of the operators. In the next 10 years, over 75% of existing RPAS will be used for crop monitoring in precision farming, where prompt management reactions to plant disease, lack of plants nutrients and environmental changes are the focal point to farm efficiency and productivity. In order to optimize the RPAS monitoring activities in terms of time (process automation) and in term of costs (economic sustainability), planning the reconnaissance operations is crucial: every single procedure to accomplish the survey mission must be examined and evaluated. Furthermore, we have to consider the Italian Regulation on RPAS that introduces restrictions on RPAS operations. Different kind of sensors can be used for crop monitoring and each sensor has a specific mission profile. Active sensors require a very low flight (within 2 meters above the ground) and a commercial RPAS cannot achieve this performance. Passive sensors require a very high overlap (over 70%) of the images. In this work, we show the calibration test performed to achieve the very low level flight, the validation of the performances, the repeatability of the flight path and the validation of sensors measurements. In this analysis, we consider a commercial active sensor.