Abstract
In Namibia, agricultural production depends on small-scale farms. One of the main threats to these farms is the birds’ attack. There are various traditional methods that have been used to control these pest birds such as making use of chemicals, fires, traps, hiring people to scare the birds, as well as using different aspects of agricultural modifications. The main problem of using such methods is that they are expensive, many are harmful to the environment or demand extra-human resources. In this paper, we investigate the potential and challenges of using a swarm of drones as an Intelligent surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) system in a bird scaring system targeting a specific type of bird called Quelea quelea, i.e., weaver bird, and on Pearl millet crop. The idea is to have a co-design methodology of the swarm control system, involving technology developers and end-users. To scare away the birds from the field, a disruption signal predator-like sound will be produced by the drone. This sound is extremely threatening and terrifying for most bird species. The empirical results show that using the aforementioned technology has a great potential to increases food security and sustainability in Africa.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Jaeger, M., Elliott, C.C.: Quelea as a Resource, pp. 327–338. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1989)
Dhindsa, M.S., Saini, H.K.: Agricultural ornithology: an Indian perspective. J. Biosci. 19, 391–402 (1994)
Kale, M., Balfors, B., Mörtberg, U., Bhattacharya, P., Chakane, S.: Damage to agricultural yield due to farmland birds, present repelling techniques and its impacts: an insight from the Indian perspective. J. Agric. Technol. 1, 49–62 (2012)
Elliot, C.: The New Humanitarian-Quelea-Africa’s most hated bird (2009). https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2009/08/19
Anderson, A., Lindell, C.A., Moxcey, K.M., Siemer, W.F., Linz, G.M., Curtis, P.D., Carroll, J.E., Burrows, C.L., Boulanger, J.R., Steensma, K.M., Shwiff, S.A.: Bird damage to select fruit crops: the cost of damage and the benefits of control in five states. Crop Prot. 52, 103–109 (2013)
Sylvester, G.: E-agriculture in Action: Drones for Agriculture, p. 112, FAO (2018)
FAO NAD WFP, “ROP, Livestock and Food Security Assessment Mission to Namibia” (2009). http://www.fao.org/3/ak334e/ak334e00.htm
Craig, A.F.J.K.: Quelea quelea, Birds of Africa, vol. 7 (2004)
Matanyairel, C.M.: Pearl Millet Production System(s) in the Communal Areas of Northern Namibia: Priority Research Foci Arising from a Diagnostic Study. Technical report (1996)
NAMIBIA, “Country Report on the State of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Namibia,” Technical report (2008)
Rohrbach, E., Lechner, D.D., Ipinge, W.R., Monyo, S.A.: Impact from Investments in Crop Breeding: the case of Okashana 1 in Namibia, International Crops Research for the Semi Arid tropics, Technical report (1999)
Shifiona, T.K., Dongyang, W., Zhiguan, H.: Analysis of Namibian main grain crops annual production, consumption and trade-maize and pearl millet. J. Agric. Sci. 8(3), 70–77 (2016)
Singh, G., Krishikosh Viewer Krishikosh (2003). https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/displaybitstream?handle=1/5810014632
Roden, P., Abraha, N., Debessai, M., Ghebreselassie, M., Beraki, H., Kohler, T.: Farmers’ appraisal of pearl millet varieties in Eritrea, SLM Eritrea Report 8, Technical report (2007)
Macauley, H.: Background paper Cereal Crops: Rice, Maize, Millet, Sorghum, Wheat. ICRISAT, Technical report (2015)
Lagrange, M.: Innovative approaches in the control of quelea, ouelea auelea lathimii. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Vertebrate Pest Conference, p. 63, Zimbabwe (1988)
Pimentel, D.: Encyclopedia of Pest Management. CRC Press (2007) www.crcpress.com
Wang, Z., Griffin, A.S., Lucas, A., Wong, K.C.: Psychological warfare in vineyard: using drones and bird psychology to control bird damage to wine grapes. Crop Prot. 120, 163–170 (2019)
Elliott, C.C.H.: The Pest Status of the Quelea. Africa’s Bird Pest. pp. 17–34. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1989)
Oduntan, O.O., Shotuyo, A.L., Akinyemi, A.F., Soaga, J.A.: Human-wildlife conflict: a view on red-billed Quelea quelea. Int. J. Mol. Evol. Biodivers. V5, 1–4 (2015)
Cheke, R.A., Veen, J.F., Jones, P.J.: Forecasting suitable breeding conditions for the red-billed quelea Quelea quelea in Southern Africa. J. Appl. Ecol. 44(3), 523–533 (2007)
Cheke, R.A., Sidatt, M.E.H.: A review of alternatives to fenthion for quelea bird control, pp. 15–23, February 2019
Cheke, R.A.: Crop Protection Programme Quelea birds in Southern Africa: protocols for environmental assessment of control and models for breeding forecasts R8314. Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich at Medway, Technical report (2003)
L.C. of Africa, Lost Crops of Africa. National Academies Press, February 1996
CABI, Quelea quelea (weaver bird). https://www.cabi.org/isc/datasheet/66441
Mulliè, W.C.: Traditional capture of red-billed quelea Quelea quelea in the Lake Chad Basin and its possible role in reducing damage levels in cereals. Ostrich 71(1–2), 15–20 (2000)
Mathew, A.: The feasibility of small grains as an adoptive strategy to climate change. Russ. J. Agric. Socio-Econ. Sci. 41(5), 40–55 (2015)
Norasma, C.Y.N., Fadzilah, M.A., Roslin, N.A., Zanariah, Z.W.N., Tarmidi, Z., Candra, F.S.: Unmanned aerial vehicle applications in agriculture. In: IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, vol. 506, pp. 012063 (2019)
Wojciechowska, A., Hamidi, F., Lucero, A., Cauchard, J.R.: Chasing lions: co-designing human-drone interaction in Sub-Saharan Africa, CoRR, vol. abs/2005.02022 (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.02022
Myllynpää, V., Misaki, E., Apiola, M., Helminen, J., Dayoub, M., Westerlund, T., Sutinen, E.: Towards holistic mobile climate services for farmers in Tambuu, Tanzania. In: Nielsen, P., Kimaro, H.C. (eds.) Information and Communication Technologies for Development. Strengthening Southern-Driven Cooperation as a Catalyst for ICT4D, pp. 508–519. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2019)
Tahir, A., Böling, J.M., Haghbayan, M.H., Plosila, J.: Navigation system for landing a swarm of autonomous drones on a movable surface. In: Proceedings of the 34th International ECMS Conference on Modelling and Simulation, ECMS 2020, Wildau, Germany, 9–12 June 2020, pp. 168–174. European Council for Modeling and Simulation (2020)
Tahir, A., Boling, J.M., Haghbayan, M.H., Plosila, J.: Comparison of linear and nonlinear methods for distributed control of a hierarchical formation of UAVs. IEEE Access 8, 95667–95680 (2020)
Yasin, J.N., Haghbayan, M.H., Heikkonen, J., Tenhunen, H., Plosila, J.: Formation maintenance and collision avoidance in a swarm of drones. In: ISCSIC 2019: 3rd International Symposium on Computer Science and Intelligent Control, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 25–27 September 2019, pp. 1:1–1:6. ACM (2019)
Mohamed, S.A.S., Haghbayan, M.H., Westerlund, T., Heikkonen, J., Tenhunen, H., Plosila, J.: A survey on odometry for autonomous navigation systems. IEEE Access 7, 97466–97486 (2019)
Rabah, M., Rohan, A., Haghbayan, M.H., Plosila, J., Kim, S.: Heterogeneous parallelization for object detection and tracking in UAVs. IEEE Access 8, 42784–42793 (2020)
Yasin, J.N., Haghbayan, M.H., Heikkonen, J., Tenhunen, H., Plosila, J.: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): collision avoidance systems and approaches. IEEE Access 8, 105139–105155 (2020)
Dayoub, M., Helminen, J., Myllynpää, V., Pope, N., Apiola, M., Westerlund, T., Sutinen, E.: Prospects for climate services for sustainable agriculture in Tanzania. In: Tsounis, N., Vlachvei, A. (eds.) Advances in Time Series Data Methods in Applied Economic Research, pp. 523–532. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2018)
Berge, A., Delwiche, M., Gorenzel, W.P., Salmon, T.: Bird control in vineyards using alarm and distress calls. Am. J. Enol. Vitic. 58(1), 135 LP–143 LP (2007)
Maintrac Group: Drones for bird control - how it works - Maintrac Group (2019). https://www.maintracgroup.com/blogs/news/drones-for-bird-control-how-they-work
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dayoub, M., Birech, R.J., Haghbayan, MH., Angombe, S., Sutinen, E. (2021). Co-design in Bird Scaring Drone Systems: Potentials and Challenges in Agriculture. In: Hassanien, A.E., Slowik, A., Snášel, V., El-Deeb, H., Tolba, F.M. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2020. AISI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58669-0_54
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58669-0_54
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58668-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58669-0
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)