Experience at a Drone Internship

Written by Vimal Velu

Edited by Isabella Castro

When I first applied for my internship at CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo, Spanish for International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) , I thought it would be a boring experience just staring at plants. I was wrong.

I applied to work in an area focused on using drones for agriculture where I worked with a

team of researchers including Dr. Kai Sunder. I had already worked with drones and

airplanes before, so I had expected the normal DJI quadcopters that are common to see flying around. Again, I was wrong.

We were working with drones called  'Dron de ala fija' by technicians, which in english means fixed wing drone. These were really big airplane-like drones with a massive camera on the bottom.

In fact, the technician told us that each camera costs around Two hundred thousand pesos, which meant they had to be handled very carefully as crashing was not an option. In return for the price, the cameras were able to capture many high-resolution images in a small-time frame and maintain crystal clear quality while traveling on a fast-moving drone.

One of the first things I learned was QGIS, a geographic information system that allows you to work with and visualize geographical data. It felt almost like combining a map with Photoshop. You could layer different types of information on top of each other and actually see patterns across a field rather than just looking at a normal photograph.

However, I don't really think this software and its uses were that important, as, like I said, I saw it as just a more complex photoshop. 

After, I moved on to how the actual field data was collected. We used an app called eMotion which gave the drone a pre-determined route to take. You could configure the route, altitude, and much more. The drone would return with hundreds of images, but those images weren't the final product. For more in-depth analysis, we used Pix4D, which could process the overlapping photographs and reconstruct the area digitally. Seeing the field turned into a detailed digital model was probably one of the coolest parts of the internship.

What I found most interesting was the purpose behind all of this technology. A drone

wasn't being used just because it was a cool piece of equipment. The images and models

could help researchers study crops much more efficiently than they could by examining

every plant individually. Instead of spending hours walking through a field trying to identify

differences, researchers could collect data over a much larger area and then use software

to find patterns that might otherwise be difficult to notice. The data could be used to identify anomalies such as irregularities in height, shape, and other disease markers including stem rust.

This showed me that technology doesn't have to replace the work scientists are doing; it can instead give them a much better way of doing it. A single flight could produce an enormous amount of information that could then be analyzed and used to make better decisions about the crops.

In conclusion, I went into CIMMYT expecting agriculture to not go far beyond plants. Instead, I found an environment where agriculture, engineering, programming, imaging, and data analysis all came together, which I found to be a truly an eye-opening experience.