Development of rapid low-cost lars platform for oil palm plantation

The need to produce high temporal remote sensing imagery for supporting precision agriculture in oil palm deserves a new low-altitude remote sensing (lars) technique. consumer over the shelf unmanned aerial vehicles (uav) and digital cameras have the potential to serve as personal remote sensing toolkits which are low-cost,efficient,rapid and safe. the objectives of this study were to develop and test a new technique to rapidly capturing nadir images of large area oil palm plantation (1 km2 ~ 4 km2). using 5 different multi-rotor uav models several imagery missions were carried out. multi-rotors were chosen as a platform due to its vertical take-off and landing (vtol) feature. multi-rotor’s vtol was crucial for imagery mission success. post processing results showed that for an area of 1 km2,it needs 2 to 6 sorties of quad-rotor uav with 4000x3000 pixel digital cameras flying at altitude of 120m above ground level and an average of 50m cross-path distance. the results provide a suitability assessment of low-cost digital aerial imagery acquisition system. the study has successfully developed a decent workhorse quad-rotor uav for rapid aerial photogrammetry imagery and delivery (rapid) in oil palm terrain. finally we proposed the workhorse uav as low-altitude personal remote sensing (lapers) basic founding element. © 2015 penerbit utm press. all rights reserved.