![]() For example, instead of applying fertilizer at the same rate across a 160-acre center pivot circle, precision agriculture systems use data on soil type and residual fertilizer variability to define different management zones within the 160 acres. Precision agriculture technology today is largely about adjusting inputs to known variability within a field, he said. “Precision ag and HTP are truly different technologies, although there is significant overlap in the research,” he said. The second is enabling breeders to accelerate crop improvements by using UAVs for high-throughput phenotyping, Thomasson said. The first is the long-established goal of his team and other AgriLife teams of taking precision agriculture to the next level. “And they have made available to him an entire commercial system, that includes a fixed-wing aircraft, a multispectral camera and all of their online cloud-based storage and processing services for the image data he collects.”Īll of this work contributes to two research goals. Cope is working with PrecisionHawk, a Raleigh, North Carolina, company specializing in agricultural uses of unmanned aerial vehicles, according to Thomasson. Dale Cope, a Texas A&M mechanical engineering department professor. “He has a rotary wing aircraft that flies low and slow, hovering over parts of the field that we are interested in gathering very highly detailed data on,” Thomasson said. Sorin Popescu, an AgriLife Research scientist in the Texas A&M department of ecosystem science and management. “He mainly flew one particular fixed-wing aircraft with a multispectral camera, and flew it a couple of times a week over the research farm.”Īnother group was led by Dr. “His group did the most flights,” Thomasson said. John Valasek, an aerospace engineer who heads the Center for Autonomous Vehicles and Sensor Systems. There were three flight teams, but the main one was led by Dr. He led a sensor team that was responsible for ensuring multispectral cameras and other sensors were properly installed and calibrated and that other scientists received useful data from the flights. There were several main teams, Thomasson said. “We didn’t get our FAA approval to fly unmanned vehicles over the research farm until around the first of June, and that’s when we started in earnest flying multiple UAVs there,” Thomasson said. The first step of the project was getting Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly unmanned vehicles over the 1,400 acres of crops at the Texas A&M farm on State Highway 60 near College Station. ![]() There were also plant breeders, weed scientists, soil scientists and others specializing in various crops from the Texas A&M department of soil and crop sciences. Within AgriLife Research and AgriLife Extension, there were engineers, such as Thomasson, from the Texas A&M department of biological and agricultural engineering. It is comprised of a wide range of scientists from AgriLife Research, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, the Texas A&M Center for Autonomous Vehicles and Sensor Systems, the Texas A&M Center for Geospatial Sciences, Applications and Technology and others. The project, established a year ago, was designed to be a multi-disciplinary, multi-agency effort. Unmanned aerial systems is an umbrella term encompassing what are commonly referred to as drones or unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs. “We have had basically five teams and over 30 scientists involved in this project.” “The original purpose of the meeting was to make clear to administrators what the group has accomplished over the last six to eight months,” Thomasson said. Alex Thomasson, Texas A&M AgriLife Research agricultural engineer, College Station. Writer: Robert Burns, 90, STATION – Team members of the Texas A&M Coordinated Agricultural Unmanned Aerial Systems Project had a lot to “show and tell” when they met on Dec. An aerial view of the Texas A&M University Riverside Campus near College Station from an unmanned aerial test vehicle.
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