ICEES 2019 Fifth International Conference on Electrical Energy Systems 21- 22 February 2019, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai,

ring, Chennai, India

Design and Modelling of anAffordable UAV Based

Pesticide Sprayer in Agriculture Applications
Venkata Subba Rao P
Srinivasa Rao Gorantla
Research Scholar Professor
Electrical and Electronics Engineering Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Vignans Foundation for Science Technology and Research Vignans Foundation for Science Technology and Research
Guntur, Andhra Pradesh Guntur, Andhra Pradesh
pvsr_eeep@vignanuniversity.org srn.gorantla@gmail.com

Abstract—The usage of multirotor helicopters in the drone sprayer [2, 3] aims to reduce the ill effects of the
agricultural system is increasing rapidly. In the present pesticides on human beings and to spray it in a short interval
of time for the large area. Due to its fastness and accuracy, it
generation Automation is used in every industrial system but reduces the time consumption and manual labour of the
not much in agriculture. Till now most of the farmers are farmers. Basically, this device works both as a quadcopter
and a spraying mechanism. It can be operated through a
applying fertilizers and pesticides manually in their fields radio controller or mobile.
especially in developing countries. This causes many health
This paper is organized as follows: system architecture in
issues to them because of the chemicals they are using. In near section II, mathematical modelling in section III, Result,
future Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) are used in the conclusion and future work are discussed in section IV and
V.
agricultural field for monitoring, analyzing the field, disease
detection, detection of the faulty area, identifying the suitable II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
pesticide and applying the pesticide in the affected area. There are two parts in system architecture: one is
Present spraying systems in quadcopters are manually Hardware and the other is Software.
controlled or semi-autonomous. In this project, UAV is used
for agricultural spraying which can be done semi
autonomously.

Keywords—Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs); Pesticide

spraying; Agricultural spraying UAV; Quadcopter;Multicopters.

I. INTRODUCTION
Due to the rapid growth in the population and
industrialization, there is a tremendous decrease in the
farming land. The world Bank says that they will need to
produce 50% more food by 2050 to keep up the demand. [1].
To meet this challenge regular forming methods have to be
changed. So, there is a need to adopt new technical
innovations and implement them in the agricultural sector.
With the advances in the agriculture field we will be able to
know about the farms such as soil PH, watersaturation,
weeds, disease, crop health, and yield can be estimated. From
this information, we can know where to irrigate and where to
apply herbicide.
Most of the formers in the developing countries like India
will have small cultivating areas. They can’t afford and adopt
new technologies in farming their lands. Hence, they are Fig. 1. System architecture for Pesticide Sprayer
continuing the old methods of cultivation. It consumes more
time and manual power which leads to tiredness and brings A. Hardware structure
many health issues as they directly expose to the fertilizers
Hardware system consists of several components [4][5].
and pesticides that they are applying to their lands.World
The fig1. shows the entire architecture of the spraying drone.
Health Organisation survey says that there were more than 3
The On-board system consists of an aluminum metal frame,
million cases of pesticide poisoning cases each year.
360 (kv) motors, four 14×4.7 propellers, a Pixhawk
This project introduces a low-cost UAV which is used for Controller board, a GPS compass module, four 45A ESCs,
pesticide spraying in the agriculture field. The agriculture power module, a 24 volts 3300mAh 6S 35C Lipo pack

978-1-5386-9249-3$31.00©2019 IEEE
ICEES 2019 Fifth International Conference on Electrical Energy Systems 21- 22 February 2019, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India

battery, Radio controller, Telemetry, Arduino Uno, L298n D. Mission planner software
motor drive and spraying mechanism. Mission Planner is an open source software for control
Plane, Copter, and Rover. Mission Planner can be used as a
B. Pixhawk 2.4.8 connections configuration utility or as a dynamic control supplement for
Pixhawk 2.4.8 architecture is shown in Fig. 2. It has 6 an autonomous vehicle. This software provides access to the
auxiliary and 8 main output ports. The ESCs for the motors google maps on PC or mobile this will help to plan and save
1-4 are connected to the 1-4 terminals of the main output.The load autonomous mission in UAV and it also helps to
radio controller is connected to the RCIN terminal. The 24 monitor the UAV by telemetry. Record of telemetry logs
volts Lipo battery is connected ESCs through power module. helps to view and analyse the vehicle performance.
The produced 5 volts constant DC from the power module
energizes the controller board. The telemetry of connected to E. Flowchart of the Overall Strategy:
the telem 1 or telem 2 in a pixhawk board. A buzzer and The flow chart of the overall strategy is shown in Fig.4
safety switch are connected to audio and switch ports
respectively.

Fig. 2. Pixhawk 2.4.8 architecture

C. Spraying system design

For spraying pesticide, a ten-channel radio is connected
to the pixhawk controller board. In that, one channel is
connected to the Arduino Uno. If that channel pin is
operated, the PWM signals will be produced by the Fig. 4. Outlook for proposed methodology
controller board and then be given to Arduino Uno. Then the
Arduino Uno generates the required pulses to the motor
driver module. This motor driver module operates the DC III. MATHEMATICAL MODELING
motor and sprays the pesticide according to the pulses given The estimated weight of the UAV is W kg, P is the shaft
by the Arduino Uno. The following Fig.3. shows the power, V is the voltage of the selected motor, I is the current
spraying mechanism.
drawn by the motors in A, the efficiency of the motor is ߟ
(0.85 to 0.95),ߩ is the air density (consider it as 1.22kg/m3),
r is the radius of the propellers in meters and T is the thrust
produced by the each motor is [6]
ܶ ൌ ሾሺߟ ൈ ܲሻଶ ൈ ʹ ൈ ߨ ൈ ‫ ݎ‬ଶ ൈ ߩሿ଴Ǥଷଷଷ (1)
In the above equation propeller hover efficiency varies
between 0.7 – 0.8
ܲ ൌ ܸ ൈ ‫ ܫ‬ൈ ݊‫ݓ‬ (2)
Equation (1) gives thrust value in Newtons and to convert
it into kg it will be divided by 9.81 and thus gives the thrust
force produced by the one motor.
The total thrust produced by the UAV
ܶ௧ ൌ ܶ ൈ ‫݃݇݌‬ (3)
Where p is the number of motors or propellers. The total
Fig. 3. Pesticide spraying mechanism thrust required ௥ is twice the weight of the UAV.
ICEES 2019 Fifth International Conference on Electrical Energy Systems 21- 22 February 2019, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India

௥ ൌ ʹ ൈ ‰ (4) The experimental setup of pesticide spraying for

agricultural lands by using UAV (quadcopter controlled by
Battery source It required is depends on discharge rate Mission planner software) is shown in the Fig.5.
Cand aampere rating of the battery IB in A.
‫ܫ‬௧ ൌ ‫ ܥ‬ൈ ‫ܫ‬஻ ‫ܣ‬ (5)
ESCs are chosen from the current rating battery and
motors. ESC current rating IE required for the UAV is
Battery current capacity ‫ܫ‬௧ by the number of motors or
propellers p.
‫ܫ‬ா ൌ ‫ܫ‬௧ ൈ ‫ܫ‬஻ A (6)

TABLE I. WEIGHT MEASUREMENTS OF THE EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

Name of the
Type Weight
Equipment

Frame weight Aluminium 1353.6 gm

Motors weight 80ൈ4 Avionic 360kv 320 gm

Propellers 45.35ൈ4 Carbon fibre 181 gm Fig. 6. The path planning for pesticide spraying mechanism

Controller board Pixhawk controller 38 gm The boundaries of spraying area should be selected in the
GPS of the Mission plannerand according to type and height
Battery Lippo 3300 mAh 550 gm
of the crop, spacing and altitude [7,8,9] should be selected in
Sprinkler Steel 150 gm the flight control software, Mission planner. Fig. 6 depicts
the path planning for an area where the spacing between two
Water tank &motor Plastic, DC motor 250 gm rows is 1 metre and altitude is 2metres. This spraying
mechanism can also be performed manually.
Telemetry 433 MHz 10 gm

Total — 2853 gm

Payload — 1850 gm

Total thrust1.22ൈ4 — 4.88 kg

The above table gives the information about the

specifications and the weight calculations of the UAV of this
project.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Fig. 7. UAV Movement of Quadcopter in a Predefined Path

The vehicle in the autonomous UAV system must move

in the pre-defined path. Fig. 7 depicts that the waypoints are
set at the ground station experimentally by using a
quadcopter (control signal given from PC). The yellow lines
indicate the predefined path from PC and purple colour line
indicates the vehicle moving path. The UAV vehicle almost
moved accordingly in the waypoints of predefined path.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

This paper discussed the design of an UAV of 4.8kg lift
capacity, within 1.8kg payload capacity. UAV is moved
Fig. 5. Hardware Implementation of pesticide spraying UAV
manually or semi-autonomously by using Mission planner
software. In future, we would like to design fully
ICEES 2019 Fifth International Conference on Electrical Energy Systems 21- 22 February 2019, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India

autonomous UAV for agriculture pesticide spraying [5] Hang Zhu, Yubin Lan, Wenfu Wu, W. Clint Hoffmann, Yanbo
application. Huang, Xinyu Xue, Jian Liang, Brad Fritz, Development of a PWM
Precision Spraying Controller for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Journal
of Bionic Engineering, Volume 7, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 276-283,
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