Kansas State researchers team with Australians in using unmanned aircraft in agriculture
MANHATTAN — Nearly 8,500 miles lie between the cities of Brisbane, Australia, and Manhattan, Kan., but a common enemy 2 mm in length is bringing the cities’ researchers together.
The Russian wheat aphid is an invasive pest that has wreaked havoc on wheat crops in the United States for nearly three decades. Australian government officials and wheat growers hope to prevent the same from happening on their island nation.
In their attempt to stave off an aphid invasion, researchers are employing a modern piece of technological equipment — an unmanned aerial system.
Brian McCornack, an associate professor of entomology at Kansas State University, is the principal investigator of a project formally titled “Optimizing Surveillance Protocols Using Unmanned Aerial Systems.”
Equipped with cameras, global positioning systems and an array of sensors, the UASs hover over fields, snapping photos every two seconds from a height of 75 to 100 feet. Those photos then are compiled into a mosaic, which allows McCornack’s small team to scan hundreds of acres of land for signs of disease or infestation.
“We can use the UAS as a kind of quick and dirty way to look at a field and assess whether we need to spend more time sampling it,” McCornack said. “It might be a field, it might be an orchard; whatever the system is that we’re interested in protecting from invasive species.”
The method offers a far more accurate and efficient way to search for pests and disease. The current method, which McCornack describes as “haphazard,” involves simply walking into a wheat field and looking for signs of distress on plants.
“But in a 100-acre field, how much of that are we actually surveying,” McCornack said. “How much can we really see knowing that we may have 20, 30 other fields that we need to sample? So what we’re trying to do is get a bird’s-eye view of a field.”
The $1.74 million project, which will last three years, is funded by the Australian government in tandem with university organizations and agricultural companies.
“Two of the species they want to keep out and don’t have yet are two that have been established for us for a long time,” McCornack said, referring to Russian wheat aphid, an insect, and wheat stripe rust, a disease. “Building a collaboration between Kansas and Australia allows us to look at those species in a natural environment.”
Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane will use similar UASs, computer programs and algorithms as McCornack’s team in Manhattan, but with different goals in mind. In Kansas, UASs will be used to determine the extent of Russian wheat aphid infestations, while in Australia they will be used to ensure there aren’t any.
“We hope to show that the use of unmanned aircraft in detecting pests is both accurate and cost effective,” Felipe Gonzalez, an electrical engineering professor at QUT, said in a statement, “that they enable more territory to be covered more cheaply and detect more pests.”
‘Drones’
When asked Friday if unmanned aerial systems are synonymous with drones, McCornack shifted in his seat in preparation for a long answer.
“Part of it is just what the perception of ‘drone’ is for people,” he said. “For the small unmanned aerial systems, it’s a little easier to digest because a payload may be five pounds versus what some people might think of as drones as carrying a payload of some kind of bomb that’s flying over a hostile area. We’re talking about two different things.”
The UASs being used by McCornack and his team are commercially available and flown by a trained UAS pilot, Travis Balthazor, a recent graduate of the UAS program at Kansas State University in Salina.
“The unmanned part is kind of misleading, because you do need a pilot that’s able to fly them in case something were to go wrong,” McCornack added.
The Federal Aviation Administration last month granted permission to Kansas State’s Salina researchers to fly UASs across the state, an unprecedented allowance, if they obtain permission from landowners.
“I don’t think that was a requirement for the FAA to come up with landowner permission but that was something the Salina group wrote in because they realize the public is still a little nervous about this as far as a surveillance tool outside of research,” McCornack explained.
FAA regulations have posed a challenge to McCornack’s prior efforts to use aircraft in his research, he said.
McCornack and his researchers are working with Kansas growers in hopes the farmers will contact them when they spot Russian wheat aphid. McCornack’s team then will obtain permission from growers and the FAA to fly over the infected fields. Ground crews will collect samples in the traditional manner as hexacopters hover overhead, taking images for later analysis.
Within days, the team will have a mosaic image of a field and be able to determine if any diseases or insects are damaging crops.
“What we look for are any abnormalities,” McCornack said. “The way that insect feeds on that plant could change the architecture quite a bit.”
For example, the Russian wheat aphid forces leaves to curl over on themselves.
“By doing that, you can imagine, it’s reflecting or absorbing different amounts of light so that infrared image is going to be different,” McCornack explained.
The future
McCornack envisions a day when unmanned aircraft hover over wheat fields, guided by GPS rather than human pilots, taking soil samples and determining nitrogen deficiencies in plants.
The same technology can be used to collect samples from forest canopies, where humans are unable to traverse.
“Pest surveillance, in forest land in particular, can be very dangerous in a conventional helicopter,” Gonzalez, the Queensland researcher, said. “The use of unmanned aircraft will enable us to fly closer so the imaging technology can be used to full advantage.”
The largest obstacle researchers face, according to McCornack, is airspace.
“(The FAA) being cautious is OK, I’m OK with it, but at the same time it could hold us back from advancing the technology because of the potential use in agriculture,” he said. “I think they’re seeing we need to move forward with that, which is why right now Kansas is the only state that has a statewide certificate of authorization but it’s because they have a really good track record with the FAA.”
After FAA regulations on unmanned aircraft loosen and self-guided UASs increasingly take flight, McCornack predicts future researchers will face a different issue — processing the data collected by UASs.
“Access to data is not the thing but how you interpret it, what you do with it, is really the next big thing,” he said. “When you’re talking about food security over the next 15 or 20 years, it’s going to take a significant amount of technology, and not just technology but information systems.”
