Development of Agricultural Drone for Coconut Farming

In this paper, an innovative new drone is created for developing the current ability of today's drone. This research starts with developing the agriculture drone for spraying fertilizer and pesticides in coconut tree farms. The developed drone can be utilized for inspecting and finding coconut tree pests using sensor image processing in order to solve the problems of using the general solutions of the pest control. These problems are as follows. Firstly, the use of a long stick tied to the hose and pesticide spray from below results in the drops of pesticide to the ground for more than 75%. Secondly, the use of chemicals injected into the trunk cannot be used for the coconut trees with less than 12 meter high particularly for aromatic coconut trees with around 5 meter high according to chemical residue. Finally, the pesticide is controlled by using a level of fertilizer higher than the recommendation. Farmers generally spray all coconut trees without consideration in which trees have the pests. The developed drone can be used for solving all of the above mentioned three problems. In the early stage of development for processing to locate the pests, the implemented program has the ability to visualize the leaf of the coconut tree that is likely to have a problem. The drone can fly to inspect and specify the pest area, spray from the top of the trunks and spray at the specific point resulted in the reduction of chemicals costs.