Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Antonio R. Asebedo / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) have been in commercial use since the1980’s and over 8-12% of its current uses are in the agricultural sector, but only involving limited uses like surveying, mapping and imaging, which is expected to increase to 47% according to AUVSI with the association of Artificial Intelligence over the next decade. Our research is one such effort to help farmers utilize advanced sUAS technology coupled with Artificial Intelligence and give them meaningful results in a widely used and user friendly interface, like a mobile application. The vision for this application is to provide a completely automated experience to the farmer for a repetitive and periodic analysis of his/her crops where all the instruction needed from the farmer is a push of a button on a one time configured application and ultimately providing results in seconds. This would help the farmer scout their crops, assess yield potential, and determine if additional inputs are needed for increasing grain yield and profit per acre. For making this application we focused on user-friendliness by abstracting crop algorithms, minimized necessary user inputs, and automate the construction of flight paths. Due to internet connection not always being available at farm fields, processing was kept to on-board compute systems and the mobile device to give live results to farmers without reliance on cloud-based analytics. The application is configured to work with DJI Aircraft using OpenCv for video processing and mobile vision, GIS and GPS data for accurate mapping, locating device, sUAS on the mobile application, and FFMPEG for encoding and decoding compressed video data. An algorithm developed by Precision-Ag Lab at the K-State Agronomy Department was implemented into the sUAS application for providing real time yield estimations and nitrogen recommendation algorithm for winter wheat.

Master of Science / Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering / Daniel Flippo / Robotic vehicles have the potential to play a key role in the future of agriculture. For this to happen designs that are cost effective, robust, and easy to use will be necessary. Robotic vehicles that can pest scout, monitor crop health, and potentially plant and harvest crops will provide new ways to increase production within agriculture. At this time, the use of robotic vehicles to plant and harvest crops poses many challenges including complexity and power consumption. The incorporation of small robotic vehicles for monitoring and scouting fields has the potential to allow for easier integration of robotic systems into current farming practices as the technology continues to develop. Benefits of using unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for crop scouting include higher resolution and real time mapping, measuring, and monitoring of pest location density, crop nutrient levels, and soil moisture levels. The focus of this research is the ability of a UGV to scout pest populations and pest patterns to complement existing scouting technology used on UAVs to capture information about nutrient and water levels. There are many challenges to integrating UGVs in conventionally planted fields of row crops including intra-row and inter-row maneuvering. For intra-row maneuvering; i.e. between two rows of corn, cost effective sensors will be needed to keep the UGV between straight rows, to follow contoured rows, and avoid local objects. Inter-row maneuvering involves navigating from long straight rows to the headlands by moving through the space between two plants in a row. Oftentimes headland rows are perpendicular to the row that the UGV is within and if the crop is corn, the spacing between plants can be as narrow as 5”. A vehicle design that minimizes or eliminates crop damage when inter-row maneuvering occurs will be very beneficial and allow for earlier integration of robotic crop scouting into conventional farming practices. Using three fixed HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors with LabVIEW programming proved to be a cost effective, simple, solution for intra-row maneuvering of an unmanned ground vehicle through a simulated corn row. Inter-row maneuvering was accomplished by designing a transformable tracked vehicle with the two configurations of the tracks being parallel and linear. The robotic vehicle operates with tracks parallel to each other and skid steering being the method of control for traveling between rows of corn. When the robotic vehicle needs to move through narrow spaces or from one row to the next, two motors rotate the frame of the tracks to a linear configuration where one track follows the other track. In the linear configuration the vehicle has a width of 5 inches which allows it to move between corn plants in high population fields for minimally invasive maneuvers. Fleets of robotic vehicles will be required to perform scouting operations on large fields. Some robotic vehicle operations will require coordination between machines to complete the tasks assigned. Simulation of the path planning for coordination of multiple machines was studied within the context of a non-stationary traveling salesman problem to determine optimal path plans.