Flapping-Wings Drones for Pests and Diseases Detection in Horticulture

Agriculture and horticulture are essential for ensuring safe food to the growing global population, but they also contribute significantly to climate change and biodiversity loss due to the extensive use of chemicals. Integrated pest management is currently employed to monitor and control pest populations, but it relies on labor-intensive methods with low accuracy. Automating crop monitoring using aerial robotics, such as flapping-wing drones, presents a viable solution. This study explores the application of deep learning algorithms, You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Faster region-based convolutional neural network regions with convolutional neural networks (R-CNN), for pest and disease detection in greenhouse environments. The research involved collecting and annotating a diverse dataset of images and videos of common pests and diseases affecting tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers cultivated in Dutch greenhouses. Data augmentation and image resizing techniques were applied to enhance the dataset. The study compared the performance of YOLO and Faster R-CNN, with YOLO demonstrating superior performance. Testing on data acquired by flapping-wing drones showed that YOLO could detect powdery mildew with accuracy ranging from 0.29 to 0.61 despite the shaking movement induced by the actuation system of the drone’s flapping wings.