Solar Powered Space-Augmented UAS Platform for large-scale Diagnostics and Decision Support in Precision Farming

SOLAR3 was designed to provide farmers, agronomists, and other agricultural experts with actionable intelligence they can use to decide on the amounts and locations of agrochemical doses for precision agriculture as well as to make other operational and strategic decisions. The project leverages advances in the domains of Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) technology, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Satellite Communications (SatCom) to develop and deploy an airborne hyperspectral remote sensing platform. The system will consists of a miniature HSI and a long-endurance solar-powered UAS developed at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL) of ETH Zurich. The proposed system will be optimised to complement space-borne observations in order to perform large scale high-resolution hyperspectral monitoring and diagnostics of crops with the objective of early detection of environmental stresses, crop-disease outbreaks and weed invasions. SOLAR3’s targeted users are large industrial growers in Eastern Europe including Ukraine with the possibility to expand to other countries and crops.