MDE-based Development of a Multispectral Camera for Precision Agriculture

Precision Agriculture in conjunction with Variable Rate Technology aims at increasing productivity while reducing resource usage (water, fertilizers, pesticides and others). Within this context, the farm's management decisions include information from data collected about the crops health development, which need to be gathered in a timely basis. There are several means of obtaining information about the plants health, including manual data collection from sensors installed in the soil and/or its vicinity, mobile sensor systems, for example embedded sensors in UAVs, or aircrafts, or other vehicles, and satellite imagery, to name just a few examples. The adoption of UAVs in such applications has gaining a lot of attention in recent years due to ease of access, low cost and available flight control software. UAV systems may carry several sensors, which include RGB, infrared, multispectral and hyper-spectral cameras. These cameras are respectively more powerful, in terms of data quality, as well as more expensive. The current paper contribution include the platform model, design and characterization of a multispectral camera system made from two low cost, commercial of the shelf cameras that can be integrated in a small UAV. These aforementioned cameras are compatible with open source hardware, namely Raspberry Pi boards, that are used to collect, process and store information.