Drone being developed to detect plant disease

research: Special cameras see what the naked eye cannot

New research is ongoing to develop a drone that can detect the early stages of plant diseases before they are visible.

Researchers at the Imperial College in London are working on the project which is using special cameras with filters that can detect the stresses on the plant before they are visible to the naked eye.

With this vital information the drone technology can alert the farmer and advise them when the correct time to apply fungicides is before the disease damages the crop.

Chris Adams is working on this drone project for his PhD at the college.

He said: “Allowing farmers to identify stress before full infection occurs is particularly important as the climate changes.

“An unpredictable environment makes it challenging to track and forecast disease.

“Diseases reduce yields when we need them to be high, as the global population grows and we need to feed more people than ever.

“Reducing yield loss to diseases like septoria will allow us to grow more food, more efficiently and on less land, benefiting the agricultural industry, the public and the environment.”

The researchers in the college’s Department of Life Sciences and Computing are partnering with agriculture services company Agrii to create the drones.

The drones will use multispectral cameras, which use special filters to capture reflected light from selected regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Capturing reflected light using several lenses and different filters simultaneously allows scientists to look at how objects reflect parts of the electromagnetic spectrum differently.

Stressed plants typically display what is called a spectral signature that distinguishes them from their healthy counterparts.