Dec 1, 2016Using UAVs to enhance precision ag
By Bill Schaefer
On a bright, sunny day during the first week of the 2016 summer, Donna Delparte and Mike Griffel were busy setting up an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, to take images over a Bonneville County potato field in eastern Idaho.
Delparte, an Idaho State University assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences, and Griffel, an agronomy manager for Simplot Growers Solutions working on his master’s degree in geosciences, hope to pinpoint individual potato plants with potato virus Y (PVY) using the UAV equipped with hyperspectral imaging sensors.
“The hope is that by developing this algorithm and procedure using advanced remote sensing, image analysis and advanced data and analytics we can use this to detect individual plants and then look at ways of removing them,” Delparte said in this video.
“By offering these remote sensing techniques, looking at the spectral fingerprint into the realm of what the eyes cannot see, it offers the opportunity to go into the field, use this technology and pinpoint those specific plants and have them removed,” she said.
‘There is a tremendous anticipation that UAVs are going to offer so many different industries, especially precision agriculture, an opportunity to be a game changer in how agriculture is done,” Delparte said. “There are a lot of companies that are diving into the precision agriculture field with unmanned aircraft systems and looking at ways of how these unmanned aircraft systems can contribute to helping farmers get a better return on investment and make better, more sustainable management decisions with their fields.”
Delparte’s project was started three years ago through seed funding by the USDA and now is funded through a grant by the Idaho Global Entrepreneurial Mission (IGEM), a grant program overseen by the state of Idaho’s Department of Commerce. IGEM seeks to partner industries with Idaho universities
“The idea is to bring commercial opportunities to Idaho to help grow Idaho’s economy,” Delparte said. “The technology that we’re developing here is Idaho grown, Idaho supported.”
Delparte said that Simplot is helping in the research by arranging grower relationships in the field and with data collection. Simplot has also provided time and support by allowing Griffel to work on the research project on company time.
“Part of my job is supporting crop advisers and farmers with our portfolio of precision ag services and that’s under the Simplot smart farm brand.,” Griffel said.
“We’ve been able to really hone in and make our (Simplot) program far more accurate and produce better results for growers and also explore very highly specified services like PVY detection,” Griffel said.
At the end of November, Delparte said the researchers had been able to identify a hyperspectral infrared wavelength to detect PVY at early emergence, late May to early June, prior to the plant’s canopy closing.
“What we’re using is an algorithm, a training algorithm, that’s giving us 90 percent accuracy on being able to detect what plant has PVY and what plant does not,” Delparte said.
Fine tuning their research into 2017 will require additional funding, Delparte said. She may pursue continued funding through IGEM; however, that may not be necessary.
“There’s been quite a bit of interest from other companies that want to take us to market,” Delparte said. “There is interest in different drone companies and potentially with a couple of other players that we’re pursuing to see if they would fund it through the next stage.”
“What we’d like to do is more follow-up in the next year and have our detector working,” she said. “Take it from this algorithm stage into a tool that we could use in the field. See if we can really tune this up and hit numbers that make a significant difference in the field.”
