A study of working time and obstacles on foliar fertilizer spraying in sugarcane fields using drones, tractors and humans

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the fertilizer spraying methods between brand new and traditional approaches. The brand-new practice is using a drone as sprayer, while the conventional methods are using a tractor and manual application. This research investigated the working time and the problems for application of fertilizer. The performance of each spraying method was evaluated using the different sugarcane’s heights between before and after spraying. The results showed that the drone had a minimum working time of 21.19 minutes. Moreover, when it was operated repeatedly on the same field, the working time dropped to 12.91 minutes because the stage of creating the flight planning was excluded. For the traditional methods, the operating times of the spraying applied by tractor and human were 22.21 and 39.49 minutes, respectively. The main factors affecting the working time of spraying drones are the field shape and obstacles in the ground, while tractor has the problems with row spacing, sugarcane's height, and headland turning. Finally, spraying by manual application usually has issues with chemical contaminants and human fatigue. When considering the change in sugarcane’s height between the month of growth after spraying, it demonstrated that the shift in sugarcane’s height was not significantly different for three types of spraying methods and excluding the spraying method. This result indicated that using the drone for fertilizing provided high field capability and gave similar spraying qualities to the traditional methods.