Commercial Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - Term Paper Example

Both ideas failed however, but the concept lived on. In the 1960s, the US started developing drones for spying and reconnaissance missions and extensively used them in the Vietnam War (UFL, 2011). With the development of artificial intelligence, today, UAV are a regular feature in military missions and are extensively used for various operations from reconnaissance to defensive and offensive missions. With increasing reliability of the UAVs, they have also now been identified for various commercial uses.

This paper discusses these commercial applications where UAVs are increasing finding use. 2. Commercial uses of UAVs As the UAVs are free from human limits of fatigue and endurance, they can perform several functions very efficiently and in areas where it is not possible or too costly/risky to reach in a piloted aircraft. With improvements in technology, efforts to reduce the operating costs of UAVs, and by complimenting the UAVs with other advanced technology and devices, several areas of commercial applications have been identified for UAVs where they can prove to be not only more cost effective but also much more efficient than conventional methods used today to do those tasks.

The following sub-sections describe each of these commercial applications. 1. 2. 2.1. . ay, this work is done by men walking in the field, using manned small aircrafts, and using other farm equipments like tractors with a sprayer fitted at the back. These methods are often time consuming and using small aircrafts is costly. Also, in order to reduce drift on the sprayed materials, aircrafts must be flown very low. Since, fields are generally surrounded by obstacles like trees, buildings, telephone and electricity lines, pilots must be very careful.

With a UAV, this task can be accomplished with much less hassles. Estimates suggest that UAVs take 1/15th the time to complete the task as compared to other conventional means (Wong, 2001) and it costs 1/10th the hourly rate of a manned helicopter (Hanlon, 2004). Figure 1: UAV helicopter being used for crop dusting Source: Gizmodo, 2006 Crop monitoring refers to monitoring the health of crops in the fields. With sensors and high resolution image processors on board the UAVs, farmers can remotely monitor the crops and take timely actions to save the crops.

Also, farmers and governments can use it for making crop yield forecasts and assessment of damage due to external factors like flooding, pests, and draught. Further, color images from UAVs can be useful for mapping invasive weed outbreaks and for revealing irrigation and fertilization irregularities in the vast farmlands. Another example of regular use of UAVs in crop monitoring is at Vineyards. Current frost detection techniques do not provide accurate and consistent data for temperature across the entire farmland.

UAVs with real-time thermal imaging could provide an excellent solution to this problem. Another area of application in agriculture industry is monitoring soil and moisture. One of the most important aspects for maximizing the crop yield is to know