Keywords
Citation
(2003), "UAV coffee project", Industrial Robot, Vol. 30 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2003.04930eaf.008
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited
UAV coffee project
UAV coffee project
Keywords: UAV, Aerospace
A team of US scientists, under a 3.76 million dollar grant from NASA, successfully pioneered the commercial use of a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to identify differences in the coffee field ripeness at the Kauai Coffee Company plantation in Hawaii.
On 30 September 2002, the team, led by Stan Herwitz of Clark University, guided the Pathfinder-Plus airplane over the 3,600 acre coffee plantation, the largest in the United States. The aircraft was launched into the national airspace and was treated like other conventionally piloted planes by the Honolulu air traffic controllers. The UAV was equipped with a pair of digital cameras mounted under its wing – a Kodak Pro Back attached to a Hassleblad camera body, and a DuncanTech digital multispectral camera with an internal prism – to acquire imagery in the optical and infrared parts of the spectrum. More than 300 high-resolution images of the fields were taken and transmitted wirelessly to the Internet at the ground station in less than 20s. Three minutes after receiving an image, glossy prints showing the different stages of the electromagnetic spectrum were generated. These were then analyzed by the plantation managers who in turn could deploy the mechanical harvesting machines to the fields with the highest percentage of ripe coffee cherries.
Though there was an 80 percent cloud cover during the acquisition period, the Pathfinder Plus' tour de force was its ability to loiter over a 4 h period to guide the plane to openings in the clouds for the mosaic acquisitioning of clear sky images.
The near real-time imaging system on solar-powered UAVs could also lead other crops and forms of precision agriculture to more effective and efficient methods. In the future, UAVs with solar-energy storage capability will allow the process to be applied to large regions for extended periods of time to aid in forest fire monitoring, weather monitoring, traffic control, disaster relief support, and commercial telecommunication functions.