UAS Crop Monitoring Mission

The use of drone for crop surveillance can drastically increase crop yields while minimizing the cost of walking the fields or airplane flying over filming and burning considerable amount of fuel (Precision Drones, n.d). It also helps to inspect the farm for insects and pests that might cause damage to the crops.
Even though some farmers have started using UAS for precision Agriculture today, there are still some concerns associated with the use of a UAS for this mission. Some of these issues will be discussed below:

First and foremost, there is lack of well trained UAS operator to fly this system. We might say why do we need a well trained operator for the mission but without a trained operator, important information that would be needed might be missed when the UAS is operated by an untrained operator. There is also the possibility that the UAS could crash which could lead to thousands of dollars repairing or even replacing it.

Secondly, there is the issue of lack of qualified technician who could work on the UAS when it has a problem. Most farmers might decide to send the UAS back to the manufacturer for repair and could take a long time before they could get it back, which during this period, there will be no way of monitoring the growth of the crops.

Finally, there is the legal issue where UAS users are restricted from flying over someone else property because most individuals might think the UAS user is interfering in their private lives, this might not be the case but if a property owner has a problem with a UAS hovering over his or her yard, there is really nothing the UAS owner can do other than to find another flight path and this might affect the productivity of the UAS (Wilde Beuger Solmecke, 2014).

References:

Precision Drone(n.d). Drones For Agricultural Crop Surveillance. Retrieved February 21, 2016 from http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html

Wilde Beuger Solmecke (2014, February 18). Civilian drones and the legal issues surrounding their use. Retrieved February 21, 2016 from https://www.wbs-law.de/internetrecht/civilian-drones-legal-issues-surrounding-use-50459/