AUTONOMOUS QUAD COPTER FOR AGRICULTURAL LAND SURVEILLANCE

An Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) or an autonomous quad copter has been developed for the purpose of agricultural surveillance. The quad copter is potentially designed for live monitoring of the entire agricultural field without the presence of the farmer in the farm. In other words the quad copter designed in autonomous mode inspects the farm field and provides live feedback to the farmer (base station) through wireless communication. The quad in the air can be controlled from the ground station through software called Mission Planner. In this paper the quad copter is designed to withstand the major challenges of flight i.e. wind, rain etc. The control system and stabilization of the quad is designed using PID algorithm. PID algorithm is a closed loop algorithm. The autonomous flight of the quad is implemented using Ardupilot APM 2.6, which is a low cost autopilot. The features like low cost and autonomous flight mode of quad copter makes it a multi-purpose vehicle and can be advantageous to commercial applications. In this experiment the quad copter is loaded with the source and destination way points, the quad copter follows the navigation points at defined height and speed in the autonomous mode and it can be transformed from autonomous flight mode to radio controlled vehicle simultaneously.