Autonomous Monitoring of Large Scale Agricultural Plants through Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The importance of understanding how crops are impacted by climate change and drought cannot be overstated as the globe continues in both population growth and industrialization. This project seeks to use UAVs in an innovative framework to improve both the efficiency and efficacy of a wide array of agricultural pursuits. For the first time, a framework to optimize the tradeoff between the monitoring accuracy provided by a UAV network, and its cost, will be developed and proposed. The primary focus of this research is in the development of models to reliably and authentically represent a UAV swarm, from power, to coordination, and overall swarm performance in a wide array of sensing applications