Development of a real-time framework for farm monitoring using drone technology

Abstract

This work developed a cost-effective framework for agriculturists to regularly monitor their crops against intruding rodents and other security concerns using modern drone technology through configuration and deployment of an autonomous UAV which also functions as a remotely piloted vehicle. This was done by configuring a quadcopter capable of causing a disturbance when a rodent is observed through an inbuilt alarm system whose sound is amplified to be loud enough to cause the animals to leave the farm area. A framework for real-time image and live video transmission from the farm to a designated remote base station was developed. This was achieved through programming codes that configured the drone to operate an intelligent alarm and object tracking systems which enables a live feed from the UAV using Arduino IDE and Mission Planner for autonomous flight control. The requisite algorithms were developed using the framework of tracking, learning and detection (TLD) in the OpenCV software. The drone movement is equally controlled remotely over a Wi-Fi network using an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module for redirection and controlling of the drone movement to monitor specific locations.