Unmanned aerial vehicle for radiometric remote sensing of the agricultural landscapes

The paper considers various aspects of using an unmanned aerial vehicle as a carrier of the passive microwave radar based on a microwave radiometer, which is designed to collect, pre-process and register information about the underlying soil surface on a memory card simultaneously in two frequency ranges and in two polarizations. Information accumulated during a flight over the agricultural lands and the navigation data are making it possible to construct georeferenced maps of the soil moisture portraits, surface and subsurface soil layers temperature maps in the information further processing. Further development of the proposed method becomes relevant, given the demand for remote monitoring of the soil moisture and temperature for accelerated introduction of the precision land management technologies in crop production. Introducing an unmanned aerial vehicle as the microwave radiometer carrier proposes a number of specific requirements for technical characteristics of the carrier. The paper considers these requirements based on the experimental results and many years of experience in using various aerial vehicles and ground-based carriers of the microwave radiometers. This experience makes it possible to formulate the required requirements for the carriers and the microwave radiometer. The research analysis results in optimizing a quadcopter, where a microwave radiometer could be installed. Its combined flight and field testing was carried out successfully in various regions of Russia.
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