Drones, Joysticks, and Data-Driven Farming

Brian Luck grew up on an 800-acre corn and soybean farm in western Kentucky, so he knows well the look of a planted field from the exact height of a tractor seat.But these days, Luck is more familiar with a much loftier view of farm fields. It’s a bird’s-eye perspective afforded by the “unmanned aircraft vehicles,” or drones, that have captured Luck’s imagination as an assistant professor of biological systems engineering and extension specialist in machinery systems at UW–Madison.From a workshop in the Agricultural Engineering Laboratory, Luck has been working to wed the programmable flight of drones with the evolving science of remote sensing — imaging farm fields with spectroscopes and infrared cameras to reveal what the naked eye cannot see.This summer, he and Shawn Steffan MS’97, an assistant professor of entomology will test knowledge gained from months of sweaty greenhouse studies by piloting their disease- and pest-seeking drone above cranberry bogs in northern Wisconsin.