Designing and manifacturing of drone for vineyard spraying applications and determining it's performance

In this study, it is aimed to design, manufacture and determine the performance of a drone that can spray and fertilize vineyard areas where ground vehicles cannot easily enter from the air. For this purpose, a drone with 6 motors and a multi-rotor system (Hexacopter) was designed and manufactured by using open source software program. After the main body of the drone, which was laser cut according to technical dimensions, was formed, the necessary organs for flight and spraying were assembled on this body, and the manufacturing process was completed and it became ready for flight. This drone has a range of 20 km and a storage capacity of 10 liters. It has the feature of spraying or spraying in fields, vineyards or different areas specified manually or automatically by giving GPS coordinates. Vehicle tracking is transmitted from the camera mounted on the drone to the controller digitally at 640x480 resolution via radio waves. With the help of TYPE-C or Micro USB cable to the remote, live image transmission is provided via mobile phone, tablet, computer. Instant flight data of the vehicle; In order to calculate general parameters such as altitude, speed, altitude, battery information, distance to the take-off site, open source Arducopter software, specially coded for this work, was used. All data specified with this software have a range of 20 Km, and it also allows devices such as computers, Android-based mobile phones and tablets to be used as ground stations. Flight trials were carried out in the vineyard areas of Dicle University, Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Horticulture. In the experiments, water sensitive papers and filter papers were used to measure the amount of trace substance and residue. These papers were placed in the upper, middle and lower parts of the vine before the trials were started. Spraying experiments were then carried out. The trials were carried out at 0.5 m/s, 1.00 m/s and 2 m/s flight speeds and at different heights such as 30 cm, 60 cm and 90 cm and with three replications. As a result of each flight trial, the amount of trace matter accumulation of the papers placed at different points of the vine tree was measured using a spectrophotometer device. Water sensitive papers were scanned from the scanner and transferred to digital media as photographs. Then, these photographs were analyzed with the help of the image processing software created in the MATLAB program, and the coverage ratio values were found by converting the value obtained by measuring the area occupied by the drops on the filter papers to %. According to the results of the flight trials, the accumulation amounts of trace material were found to be higher in the upper regions of the plant, and the accumulation amounts decreased as the lower regions descended. In general, the best amount of trace material deposition at all travel speeds was obtained at 30 cm flight altitude. While the amount of accumulation in the plant at 0.5 m/s flight speed was 24-25 µgcm-2, this value decreased to 20-21 µgcm-2 at 60 cm height and 20 µgcm-2 at 90 cm flight height. Therefore, the lowest accumulation amount obtained at 0.5 m/s feed rate was realized in the trials made from a height of 90 cm. The amount of residue accumulation was halved at a flight speed of 2 m/s and at an altitude of 90 cm compared to a speed of 0.5 m/s. At all flight speeds and heights, the highest amount of residue was formed in the upper part of the vine, while this ratio decreased towards the lower region. It was concluded that the increase in the spray height also negatively affected the penetration of the droplets into the plant. It has been observed that the amount of accumulation is better at low speeds, and as the speed increases, the amount of accumulation in the plant decreases due to the air flow created by the propellers