UAV-Based Agricultural Monitoring and Data Acquisition System for Precision Farming

We report on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agricultural data acquisition system to substantially improve how farming is currently practiced. The demonstrated innovative platform simplifies data acquisition with high spatial and temporal resolution and high accuracy with affordable cost and hence accessible for wider communities. Our goal was to create a product capable of analyzing multiple crucial soil parameters via one unit and transfer the accumulated preprocessed data to an airborne mobile subsystem. The system consists of two modules working in harmony. The Soil Data Monitoring Probe (SDMP) is a stationary unit housing various soil probes, whereas the Airborne Data Acquisition System (ADAS) is a mobile unit that can be placed on a UAV. The SDMP captures soil metrics, preprocesses them and stores the data to an SD card, to be delivered using a NRF24 transceiver. The unit itself is battery and solar-powered, regulated power is fed through a custom-designed motherboard to the Arduino mega microcontroller (ATMEGA-2560), and internal/external modules. We estimated that, with its low-power design and the complementary solar power, it can work months without interruption. The ADAS is lightweight and was mounted on a drone. It initiates data collection by interrogating sleeping SDMP' s based on geolocation stamps by waking them up from deep sleep mode with an interrupt. The ADAS is supported by a custom motherboard to support a raspberry pi zero with Wi-Fi capabilities. We demonstrated the operational prototype system with 2-meter spatial resolution.