Development of a low-cost autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for agricultural remote sensing

Contact: Manuel Vázquez-Arellano
Email: mvazquez@uni-hohenheim.de
Master Thesis, Bachelor Thesis

Today's agricultural operations need to be more efficient in the use of resources. Agricultural robots can provide complete new operations and hence contribute to improve agricultural practices. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have a lot of applications in agricultural scenarios not just for crop status data collection, but also for some applications that require low-weight load.

Currently, it is possible to build an low cost octocopter with carbon fibre structure and controlled by the robot operation system (ROS). .The objective is to construct an octocopter using a low-cost electronics such as Raspberry pi, Gertbot and test the devise to obtain visual information of crop status such as NDVI or 3-D crop reconstruciong using structure-from-motion technique.

Basic knowledge of software and strong interest on electronics and mechanics.