Band-reconfigurable Multi-UAV-based Cooperative Remote Sensing for Real-time Water Management and Distributed Irrigation Control

This paper presents an overview of ongoing research on small unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) for cooperative remote sensing for real-time water management and irrigation control. Small UAVs can carry embedded cameras with different wavelength bands, which are low-cost but have high spatial-resolution. These imagers mounted on UAVs can form a camera array to perform multispectral imaging with bands reconfigurable dependent on mission. Development of essential subsystems, such as the UAV platforms, embedded multispectral imagers, and image stitching and registration, is introduced together with real UAV flight test results of three example missions. Finally, an outline of future research efforts is presented.