Advancing Precision Agriculture: The Role of UAVs and Drones in Sustainable Farming

Modern sustainable agricultural production trends pose a need to change production technology processes with the application of techniques, and tools that cause less environmental pollution and contribute to ensuring health safety in general. Precision agriculture can be defined as an agricultural production process that includes the application of information technology and various types of sensors, satellite positioning, and monitoring of farming machinery. Aerial remote sensing is regarded as one of the most crucial technologies for smart and precision agriculture. This mini-review aims to summarize the applications of drones in precision agriculture with special reference to crop monitoring and pest management. Drone equipped with modern capabilities like Artificial Intelligence integrated systems with multispectral cameras help the farmers to observe aerial images of crops in real time. Camera-equipped drones use advanced image data analysis tools to identify diseased or defective plants which assists the farmer in crop monitoring. Also, the fully automatic pesticide spraying system analyzes real-time data and is capable of spot spraying. The use of drone-borne sprayers in the field increases coverage, chemical effectiveness, and make spraying operations easier and faster. Each type of drone has its performance drawbacks, such as high operating and maintenance costs, limited flight range, time, and payload capacity, but with accelerating technology development and the systems integrated into drones, they offer a promising role in advancing precision agriculture.