Increasing demand for sustainable agricultural food production and mitigating the changing weather conditions require more continuous crop monitoring and field data management. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide versatile methods for aerial imaging of different crop fields to extract plant and crop characteristics. There is a need to investigate operational performance of UAVs especially when larger field areas are desired to be covered, and more frequent flight mission are planned. Agricultural drones rely on lithium based electrical batteries that offer adequate performance but add substantially weight to the drone. Therefore, weight-optimal design and energy-optimal flight planning are desired features for agricultural drones. This research evaluates the operational performance of a custom-built agricultural drone focusing on the flight conditions, energy consumption, drone design and mission planning. The research results indicate that the custom-built drone shows robust operation during the measurements in 2020 and 2021. The energy analysis clearly shows that the drone operation is energy intensive, and the flight time is quite limited. It can be concluded that the drone weight and battery performance are the key elements for increasing the operation performance of agricultural drones.

P6-12 Evaluation of the operational performance of an agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle

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Electrifying mobility is propelling new technologies, empowering consumers to take concrete action and is demanding politicians to take swift and concrete action.

What will the future of electric mobility look like? And what are the biggest challenges for realizing zero emission transport on the road, at sea and in the air? 

The 13th-15th June, people from all over the world will travel to Oslo, the world’s leading player in electric transport, to participate in this year’s biggest EV conference.