ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract. The application of pesticides and fertilizers in agricultural areas is important for crop yields. The use of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) improves spray distribution, speed and effectiveness as well as reducing labor costs and operator exposure. However, effects of spray factors of UAV are supposed to be study further to prevent over- or under-spray applications on aimed targets. In this paper, the spraying simulation and experiments of UAV were carried out on the simulation platform with the WSPs fixed on the five tea trees in the region of spraying. The effects of flight velocity and distance from the flight route for UAV spraying were studied. Individual droplet sizes, their distributions, total droplet number, droplet density, percentage of spray coverage and distribution uniformity were displayed with different flight velocities of 0.3, 0.5, 0.7 m/s and different plants locations using water sensitive papers (WSPs) combined with an image-analyzing software of ImageJ. The results demonstrated that droplet distribution uniformity was improved while droplet density and percentage of spray coverage were decreased as the flight velocity increased.