Insights

Led by Glen Salo, manager of the company’s Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory (CSE Lab), the Beyond the Booth session entited, Feeding the World – An Opportunity for UAS, presented results from an independent research and development (IR&D) project that employed UAS to detect plant emergence at field-scale levels. Working with university researchers and agriculture industry partners near the company’s Champaign, Illinois-based CSE Lab, Riverside Research identified numerous potential applications of UAS to agriculture. Read the abstract below.

Abstract: Feeding the World – An Opportunity for UAS
According to the United Nations General Assembly report GA/EF/3242 released on 9 October 2009, global food production must double by 2050 in order to meet the demands of a growing world population. This doubling must occur despite a decline in tillable land and the technical challenges that must be overcome. In an acknowledgement of this difficulty, the United Nations report states that innovative strategies are needed to help combat world hunger. To this end, UAS and the unprecedented imaging and remote sensing capabilities they offer have the potential to radically influence agricultural research, production, and economics, and hence, the potential to help solve the challenge we face in feeding the world. This talk will identify the potential application of UAS to precision agriculture and will present results from the aforementioned IR&D project conducted by the CSE lab in collaboration with industry and academia.