Low-Cost Live Insect Scouting Drone: iDrone Bee

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, e.g., drones) are a common tool for many civil applications, including precision agriculture, transportation, delivery services, rescue missions, law enforcement, and more. Remote sensing technologies used in conjunction with drones are a dominant application in precision agriculture. Multispectral instrumentation attached to UAVs allows the user to observe multiple parameters, including the normalized difference vegetation index which can represent crop stresses induced by various factors (e.g., drought, insect outbreak, nutrient loss, and other diseases). However, little research has been done to apply drones to accomplish a mission-oriented actionable task in agriculture, such as insect sampling. We propose a low-cost, open source-based live insect scouting drone named ‘iDrone Bee’ to benefit the integrated pest management (IPM) community by minimizing time and efforts of human interventions while collecting live insects in agricultural fields. Herein we present instruction and operation procedures to build and operate an iDrone Bee for insect scouting in an agricultural ecosystem and validate the system in an alfalfa seed field. The findings of this investigation demonstrate that a drone-based insect scouting method may be a valuable tool to benefit the IPM community.