DESIGN OF A LOW-COST UAV FOR AGRICULTURAL PURPOSES

Abstract

Unmanned air vehicles are a promising technology having a wide range of applications. In this technologically evolving world, numerous new precision farming technologies have emerged to optimize crop productivity and to combat the food crisis of the ever-rising world population with limited land resources. Particularly, in a developing agro-economy like Pakistan, over 42.02% of the total employable population are employed in agribusinesses. This sector contributes 25% to GDP and makes up 65% of the total exports. Despite the immense importance of this sector in the economy of Pakistan, owing to the absence of state-of-the-art farm technologies, the agribusinesses face drastic losses, especially due to pest attacks and diseases, for example, Pakistan cannot produce more than 14 million bales of cotton a year because of pest attacks only. To combat pest attacks and diminish pest-related diseases chemicals called pesticides are utilized to kill pests and insects to increase crop yields. These chemicals are typically toxic to humans as well. The World Health Organization estimated as many as one million instances of illnesses due to exposure to pesticides during manual spraying of crops. Unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming increasingly popular in pesticides spraying to limit human exposure to pesticides to alleviate associated health problems. UAVs also reduce the time and effort needed to complete the task, consequently increasing crop productivity. However, despite the advantages that the use of UAVs offers in the pesticide spraying process, UAVs require high initial investment due to the high cost of commercially available UAVs. This cost is further increased for Pakistani farmers due to the absence of local manufacturers of agricultural UAVs. In a fragile economy like Pakistan, this discourages the use of UAVs in agribusinesses. Therefore, the objective of this work is the design of low-cost UAV for farming application. To make the flying process of UAV easier for untrained farmers in rural Pakistan, we are aiming to produce an autonomous UAV that requires minimum