Estimativa da biomassa da cultura do milho por meio de vant/drone

Abstract

The development and transfer of new technologies are crucial to the economic success of the agricultural sector. Currently many efforts are spent to create methodologies for crop yield control, nutritional and hydric status, health aspects or crop forecasting. In this scenario, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are inserted in a promising way, as the advantages of obtaining aerial images with high spatial resolution associated with low investment cost compared to other methods acquisition. Thus, the main objective was to create a methodology to accurately estimate the biomass of commercial planting of corn using aerial images obtained by UAV, as well as evaluating the steps of image acquisition, scheduled flight, processing with PhotoScan software (AgiSoft) georeferencing of orthophotos and digital elevation models (DEM) generated, in addition to cloud quality points.Three flights were made in a center pivot sprinkler system area in the city of Limoeiro do Norte, Ceará, Brazil, in October 2015, using two UAVs: Phantom 2 and 3, from DJI Innovations, associated with cameras GoPro Hero 4 Silver and Ricoh GRLENS. There were two flights to 60 meters high (Ricoh GRLENS camera and GoPro Hero 4 Silver) and a flight to 30 meters high (GoPro Hero camera 4 Silver), to assess the level of detail of the products generated and cloud quality points. At the same time we sampled eight points for the estimation of biomass in the field, serving as validation for the estimates made through aerial images.The proposed methodology proved to be need for the flight to 30 meters high, with estimated biomass value of 2.97 kg m-2, similar to the estimated field of 2.92 kg m-2. Processing with Ricoh GRLENS camera proved less effective, obtaining 2.21 kg / m², while processing with GoPro camera 60 meters biomass resulted in an estimated value of 2.72 kg / m². The results are promising, showing that the method can be combined in predicting harvests and crop yields.