Solar‑Powered Autonomous Drone System for Precision Agriculture

Abstract

Against this a global transformation of agriculture is undertaken through precision-agriculture techniques that depend on timely and high-resolution monitoring of crops, soil and environmental parameters. One of the technologies that can deliver this has been in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones, which are limited by limited battery capacity and often require re-charging thus limiting their use in large scale or off grid farms. The proposed research aims to evaluate and develop a solar-powered autonomous drone system (SPADS) to perform precision agriculture and morphological surveillance of crops, identifying stress and irrigation requirements (computer vision + ML) with advanced sensor packages (multispectral, thermal, RGB) and solar energy (photovoltaic power) as a low-carbon energy source (long autonomous mission) due to its solar capabilities. The paper outlines system design, data collection and experimental implementation in test plots, and provides the results that SPADS can work with full daylight cycles, generate high quality maps of vegetation and moisture and identify the early signs of crop stress with an 94 percent success rate. The system saves time, energy experiences and increases the scope of precision agriculture over distantly placed or resource constrained farms. The results justify the use of solar-powered UAVs as a potential and scalable solution to sustainable and energy-efficient monitoring and management of crops.