Development of rapid low-cost lars platform for oil palm plantation

Abstract

The need to produce high temporal remote sensing imagery for supporting precision agriculture in oil palm deserves a new low-altitude remote sensing (LARS) technique. Consumer over the shelf unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and digital cameras have the potential to serve as Personal Remote Sensing Toolkits which are low-cost, efficient, rapid and safe. The objectives of this study were to develop and test a new technique to rapidly capturing nadir images of large area oil palm plantation (1 km2 ~ 4 km2). Using 5 different multi-rotor UAV models several imagery missions were carried out. Multi-rotors were chosen as a platform due to its vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) feature. Multi-rotor’s VTOL was crucial for imagery mission success. Post processing results showed that for an area of 1 km2, it needs 2 to 6 sorties of quad-rotor UAV with 4000x3000 pixel digital cameras flying at altitude of 120m above ground level and an average of 50m cross-path distance. The results provide a suitability assessment of low-cost digital aerial imagery acquisition system. The study has successfully developed a decent workhorse quad-rotor UAV for Rapid Aerial Photogrammetry Imagery and Delivery (RAPID) in oil palm terrain. Finally we proposed the workhorse UAV as Low-Altitude Personal Remote Sensing (LAPERS) basic founding element.