Location: Crop Production Systems Research
Project Number: 6066-22000-081-004-N
Project Type: Non-Funded Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: May 1, 2016
End Date: Apr 30, 2021
Objective:
The objectives of this research include: 1) To develop and evaluate unmanned aerial systems (UAS) as platforms for imaging systems used for agricultural applications including weed and crop stress detection in agricultural fields;
2) To develop methods and algorithms for processing and analyzing the images acquired from UAS for accurate detection of weeds and crop stress and integrate the results with the observations from satellites, airplanes, and on-the-go ground systems.
Approach:
The collaborative works will be conducted jointly by Crop Production Systems Research Unit (CPSRU), Jamie Whitten Delta States Research Center (JWDSRC), Agricultural Research Service (ARS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Geosystems Research Institute (GRI), Mississippi State University. The collaboration will involve development and implementation of engineering technologies to use in unmanned aerial systems for effective plant sensing in crop fields. It will cover the following aspects: 1) new UAS platforms, imaging sensors and data processing, and analysis infrastructure; 2) methods and algorithms for UAS image processing and analysis; 3) scale up and scale down of UAS data analysis results; 4) data fusion and assimilation from different sources; and 4) applications in detection of herbicide-resistant weeds, wild host plants of the tarnished plant bug, and crop stress from herbicide damage, nutrition and disease, insect, and water deficency. The collaborative research and development will be conducted through lab studies and field experiments at the GRI of Mississippi State University in Starkville, MS, and the USDA-ARS-CPSRU in Stoneville, MS. The two parties will share the results and authorship on proceedings/conference and peer reviewed journal publications.
