The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle team (UAV) at the University of California Merced is an engineering service learning team dedicated to promoting drones as a tool for sustainability. We will be partnering with the Merced County Cooperative Extension to help establish a bridge between the community of local growers and the ongoing research on drones. The University of California Cooperative Extension is a center dedicated to help farmers develop more efficient methods of growing and aiding in the management of their crops and their respective problems such as pest control and water-use through the UC research programs. Our goal is to design and build a UAV that will help local, small-scale farmers solve current on-going problems that will result in a healthier, more economic, competitive, and higher profiting business.
Monitoring fields is essential to assure a good harvest. Without regular and extensive monitoring of crops small problems can quickly expand - insect infestations, crop diseases, or minor damages in an irrigation system can have devastating effects when left unaddressed. In all these cases, early detection of the problem is key in fighting these threats. Unfortunately this requires rigorous, time-consuming, manual inspection of fields, row by row. During peak season, inspections need to be conducted up to several times a week. This demand, especially with small growers, is too large for them to keep up. As a result problems or pests are often discovered only after they have spread a substantial amount, causing the need for a greater amount of time, work, or pesticides to remedy the situation. An efficient, automated monitoring system that provides early and precisely localized warnings of pest outbreaks and other problems would not only reduce burden on the grower (both in workload and financial terms), but also reduce the use of pesticides substantially – benefiting the overall health of the community and the environment.
UAVs have a high potential in this field, as they can provide high resolution aerial images while covering large acreage quickly - potentially drastically reducing the amount of man-hours spent on row-by-row inspections. They might also be used in small area, precision insecticide application.
With the aid of the Merced County cooperative extension and UC Merced MESA lab, the UAV Engineering Service Learning team will propose and develop a UAV-based solution that exploits the above-mentioned potentials of the technology. Spring 2014 is the team’s first semester, and we look forward to an exciting future.
