UAV-Borne Dual-Band Sensor Method for Monitoring Physiological Crop Status

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with dual-band crop-growth sensors can achieve high-throughput acquisition of crop-growth information. However, the downwash airflow field of the UAV disturbs the crop canopy during sensor measurements. To resolve this issue, we used computational fluid dynamics (CFD), numerical simulation, and three-dimensional airflow field testers to study the UAV-borne multispectral-sensor method for monitoring crop growth. The results show that when the flying height of the UAV is 1 m from the crop canopy, the generated airflow field on the surface of the crop canopy is elliptical, with a long semiaxis length of about 0.45 m and a short semiaxis of about 0.4 m. The flow-field distribution results, combined with the sensor’s field of view, indicated that the support length of the UAV-borne multispectral sensor should be 0.6 m. Wheat test results showed that the ratio vegetation index (RVI) output of the UAV-borne spectral sensor had a linear fit coefficient of determination (R(2)) of 0.81, and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.38 compared with the ASD Fieldspec2 spectrometer. Our method improves the accuracy and stability of measurement results of the UAV-borne dual-band crop-growth sensor. Rice test results showed that the RVI value measured by the UAV-borne multispectral sensor had good linearity with leaf nitrogen accumulation (LNA), leaf area index (LAI), and leaf dry weight (LDW); R(2) was 0.62, 0.76, and 0.60, and RMSE was 2.28, 1.03, and 10.73, respectively. Our monitoring method could be well-applied to UAV-borne dual-band crop growth sensors.