Enhancing Agricultural Pesticide Application Through a Custom-Built Hexacopter Equipped with Advanced Control and Navigation Systems

Nowadays, technology has been developed to assist farmers in spraying pesticides. This research aims to design a low-cost drone that can spray pesticides on plants. The drone implemented is a type of hexacopter made of aluminium material with dimensions of 1130 mm and is controlled by Pixhawk. The drone moves using six propellers, each 15x5.5 inches in size, mounted on the Sunnysky X4112S 485 KV brushless motor. The drone can be flown manually and autonomously with several motion modes such as hover, roll, pitch, and yaw. For drone stability, a PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) controller was applied. Additionally, the Hexacopter is equipped with an ul- trasonic sensor to maintain a position of 1–2 meters above the tree. The drone has been tested and can fly for 7 minutes and 2 seconds without a load and for a maximum of 3 minutes and 48 seconds with a full tank of water, using a 6S 6200 mAh LiPo battery.