On Tuesday March 5th, the Engineering Service Learning Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) team bonded over a visit to the UC Merced Castle Research Center. At Castle, the conduct research to improve the ways of agriculture with the use of many drones and other remote controlled technology. The UAS team took a brief tour of the Castle facility then sat through a very informative presentation conducted by Haoyu Miu. This trip gave the team insight to prior research that is already being conducted for agricultural purposes such as walnut and almond farms.
The UAS Team jumped into three vehicles and headed over towards the Castle research facility located here in Merced. When we arrived, the team was greeted by Haoyu Miu. He walked us through the facility and the research center to show the team the many drones and technology that is used. After the walk around the facility, the team was sat down and given a presentation by Miu himself. The presentation contained information about nematodes. Root Knot nematodes are known as one of the popular nematode that damages crops. They are easily spread through the tools used in the soil and the boots of the farmers themselves. We were educated on this $3 million project being conducted here in Merced because the university is located in the heart of California. The objective of this research that Dr. Chen is in charge of is known as the aerial hyperspectral sensing. For this, Dr. Chen is in charge of creating a drone platform, develop safe operation procedures, processing of the images taken by the drone and overall, to create a low cost platform for the early detection of nematodes. During the presentation, Miu also showed the team examples of the thermal images that result from hundreds of photos taken from the drone and then stitched together to create one big image. The team also learned what image processing by machine learning algorithms looks like.
This experience was very educational and informative for the team. With this new found knowledge about the drone and the image processing that is conducted to assist the farmers in detecting infected crops as early as possible, the team can now take this into consideration when programming our own drone.
UAS closley analyzes a drone built by the Castle Facility.
UAS tours the Castle Faciity, paying close attention to all the projects built by Castle themselves.
The UAS team is given a brief presentation about the nematodes.
The UAS team is given a presentation about the effect nematodes have and which nematodes to target.
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