Sensing from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Remote sensing data acquired from traditional satellite and aerial platforms have been used for many years to support precision agriculture studies and decisions. More recently, small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become ubiquitous in precision agriculture for a variety of applications, such as, crop vigour mapping and disease monitoring and for a variety of reasons, such as, ease of use, small pixel size of images and relatively low cost. This chapter describes some of the basics of using UAVs in precision agriculture, including data acquisition and processing, characteristics of available and commonly used UAVs, example applications, sample imagery, pros and cons of using UAVs, a brief UAV case study, and future needs and considerations.