Birds often eat a lot of crops and are often used to fixtures designed to scare them away. This is why scientists are now considering using autonomous UAVs to accomplish this work In a recent study conducted by a team at Washington State University, cameras were installed around small plots of land, accompanied by customized multi rotor UAVs. The real-time output of the camera is continuously analyzed by a machine vision algorithm, which has been trained to recognize the flapping movement of birds.
Since it was difficult to find enough birds when needed, the researchers instead asked volunteers patrolling in the wild to imitate the beating with their hands. The system can recognize these actions in about 92% of the time and respond by deploying UAVs to hover at relevant positions.
Of course, human volunteers will not be frightened by the aircraft. However, in previous studies conducted by the same group of scientists, it was found that the manually operated UAV was very effective in driving away real birds.
In one study, the use of drones reduced the number of birds in an area to one fourth of the original number. In another study, fruit damage was reduced by 50% in fields that used drones to drive birds away. In addition, an unrelated study announced earlier this year showed that automatically deployed drones were effective in driving pigeons out of the roof.
Nevertheless, the researchers say more research is still needed, especially to see whether birds will become accustomed to drones over time. If they do so, additional measures will be required.
"We can make the UAV look like a predator, or have a really shiny reflective propeller," said the chief scientist, associate professor Manoj karkee. "All this work together will probably keep birds away from those vineyards and fields. We need years of research to determine this."
A paper on this research was recently published in computers and electronics in agriculture 》In magazines.