PARTNER FOCUS
The fourth industrial revolution offers new capabilities in agriculture with UAVs
Components Bureau presents a line-up of power products that can handle the requirements of unmanned aerial vehicles
I
ndustry commentators point to the 2020s as being the decade for Industry 4.0 to really take hold. In multiple sectors of the economy, large strides in technology are changing the way businesses operate and how we live: moving towards an Internet of Things approach where Machine-to- Machine communication facilitates complex and reactive pipelines.
This “fourth Industrial revolution” is taking its hold in the agricultural sector too: with one tool driving this change and providing a generational leap in farming efficiency for those with the foresight to buy in: the industrial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)… or more commonly known as the drone.
20 MAY 2021 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
The majority of drones in the industrial sector take the form of nimble quadcopters or hexacopters where either four or six powerful rotors power a UAV that uses six- axis stabilisation for precise programable motion. Initially geared towards the realm of the recreational “drone enthusiast”, the fall in the cost of drone technology now makes it viable for use in industry to improve automation and data collection.
Data collection
One of the most popular applications for drones in farming is surveying land and collecting and interpreting data. This is where high resolution (up to 4K) cameras come in
to play. Usually installed on a pivoted support system called a “gimbal”, camera drones can be used to scan large swaths of farmland and with mobile networking, this information can be sent in real-time to a technician’s computer for analysis.
Farmers can use drones to identify crop health and map growth patterns. They can also be used for surveillance to track wildlife (with the added benefit of a noisy quadcopter having the ability to scare away any rabbits!).
For livestock farmers, camera drones can be used to easily get a top-down view of dozens of acres of land at a time, allowing for farmers to achieve detailed tracking of
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