Seminar with Stephen Wilkerson - at 12noon TODAY in room 112
Drone Technologies Used to Assess Modern Farming Practices
Drone Technologies Used to Assess Modern Farming Practices in Undergraduate Research with PBL
by
Stephen Wilkerson et. al.
In
order to keep pace with population growth, farmers are utilizing a host of new
technologies to include Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), along with
increased chemical pesticides and fertilizer usage. These new techniques have
led to runoff problems for water systems and local watersheds. Using Drone
based technologies the overuse of fertilizers, chemical sprays and pesticides can
be minimized while preserving farm output and quality. In particular, we look
at the use of multispectral camera technologies along with drones to survey
farms growing corn in varying climates. The technologies used to assess farms
and modern farming practices are by their nature multidisciplinary. Students
needed to rely on their engineering and scientific backgrounds while learning
completely new and unrelated topics in order to tackle this real-world problem.
In this work we examine the teaching challenges encountered when using
Project-Based Learning (PBL) techniques with engineering students to tackle a
multidisciplinary problem similar to the types they will likely face in the
future. For example, students needed to apply best principles to design and
build a drone system to assess crop health, but moreover they needed to
understand the legal responsibilities of operating drones, farmer issues, and a
host of technologies that they were totally unaware of prior to this project. The
project was part of a yearlong capstone project in the engineering and computer
science fields of study. Student metrics and outcomes are assessed to improve
the process for future years. This work documents lessons learned, and progress
made in this capstone project using PBL for undergraduate
research.