Novel Approaches for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, precision agriculture and digital agriculture have been increasing exponentially. One of the distinguishing technologies in these fields is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV promotes a new view of the field. The greatest power of this technology is to collect precision data that enable farmers, researchers, and rural professionals to understand the studied field better, while having this information in real time or in a relatively short time of processing data.
They could be used to identify crop diseases, pest attack, weed outbreaks, unhealth areas in the paddock, animals’ diseases, animals’ behaviors, wild animals’ traffic and behavior on the farm, and so on. Moreover, UAV can use LiDAR or photogrammetric systems that can be used to identify the topography of the farm, define better crop fields, define the mechanizable areas, define the crop rows, calculate areas, calculate volumes, and have also been used to create 3D images of the landscape and buildings to plan the management of the farms and evaluate the environmental impacts. Other UAV applications, such as spraying, seeding and GHG gas detection, are becoming more used in farms and must be studied more.
The use of UAV is now being related to the big data collection, data science, deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other smart technologies. As can be seen, the UAV in a farm presents many applications, and everyday new uses and technologies are being developed in this field. This Special Issue is focused on the development in the field of novel UAV uses, applications, advances, data collection, data work, and in all of the themes related to this rapidly improving field.
We proudly invite the community of scholars to submit their research from across the spectrum of novel approaches for unmanned aerial vehicles in the area of agriculture, livestock, forestry, rural buildings, rural topography.
Contributions could include, but are not limited to, UAV applied in agriculture, UAV applied in livestock, UAV applied in rural buildings, UAV applied in forestry, UAV spraying applications, UAV seeding applications, UAV LiDAR and photogrammetric systems, remote sensing from UAV images, multispectral imagery, weeds, pests and diseases detection from UAV, spectral data analytics, image processing, vegetation indices, thermal imagery, GHG gas detection from UAV and UAV design for agricultural uses.

Dr. Gabriel A.e.S. Ferraz
Dr. Giuseppe Rossi
Guest Editors