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Langdon, ND | Remote sensing using UAVs can work in a more timely manner but you also have to understand what your trying to view. Sure a UAV works well looking at one field at a time and seems very timely but if your working with infrared sensors on a UAV you usually have to bring that into a GIS software and stitch many different image tiles together to get your results and that's for one field. Each field may take an hour of flight time plus the computer work associated with it.
UAV's IMO work better for looking at small specific areas with the aide of another map. I will say satellites in the past haven't been as timely but that is all about to change, look up Planet Labs, Skybox, and Urthecast for reference. Daily imagery with satellites is going to happen within the next two years and satellite can also view millions of acres a day from a 1m to 5m resolution which is plenty good for prescription maps. I'm guessing imagery will become cheaper too and as long as it can be delivered I see a resurgence in satellite imagery.
Where UAVs can play a role is looking at very small specific areas of concern (disease, pest, operator error, etc...) problem in a timely fashion with just general video, normal camera, or some sort of sensor perhaps then using that data in conjunction with other data (say more timely imagery, yield, veris, soil, etc...) to make a more accurate prescription map to possibly deter the problem spotted by the UAV. Also with UAVs is the centimeter resolution they can get really needed especially for prescription making? I don't think so now but surely there are applications for it out there with research and other things.
IMO UAVs just are not scalable for commercial practices yet but can work for research or individual farmers looking at problems but farmers are going to have to remember that these are expensive breakable machines and aren't just toys. Inherently there is problems with everything but everything has a niche of some sort. Its going to take some time for UAVs to find it, I just don't think it will be in a commercial aspect as much cause of legality, scalability, and cost.
Sorry for my long thoughts Gary but with the other question I've seen fixed wing is better for infrared sensors and the flight time is greater but cost is higher. Copter types have less cost but sacrifice flight time which causes scalability problems but they are better for pin pointing areas of interest with still video/pictures. Of course with anything that files wind and rain are problems too, not sure which one is better for that. | |
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UAV hype or New item to pay attention to
