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December 2017 WINES&VINES 61 WINE EAST GRAPEGROWING I recently acquired a new hammer, in the form of an aerial drone, and have been using it to hover over vineyards to look for nails. I have found many "nails" in the process. I, drone: Separation of concerns In the past 20 years, the word drone has be- come synonymous with two types of devices: 1) multimillion-dollar remotely piloted war machines equipped with spy cameras and ex- plosives, and 2) tiny four-propellered toy he- licopters equipped with spy cameras piloted around your property by the neighbor's kids. Although many people think of a drone as ei- ther an unmanned airplane or helicopter, it is the lack of an on-board human pilot that de- fines the term, not the act of flying. A tank, for example, could also be a drone. Perspective and freedom of motion When collecting data via remote sensing, aerial vehicles have the advantage of altitude, which gives cameras or other sensors a very wide field of view. This enables them to inspect large acreages in very short timeframes. Compare this to ground-based vehicles, which must navi- gate obstructions and painstakingly zig-zag between crop rows to cover the same area. Small aerial platforms are hindered by short fuel supplies. If an aerial drone is used to per- form a task at low altitude, it can no longer use a wide field of view to reduce task duration and will require refueling more frequently than a ground-based platform. Who is really in control? It is often assumed that drones are always pi- loted by a human via remote control, but this is not always true. While usually under the control of a human, drones are also always under the control of at least one computer and sometimes completely beyond the reach of human influence. When planning a routine vineyard map- ping mission, I use software on an iPad to define flight parameters such as the vineyard boundaries, flight altitude, preferred com- pass headings, camera settings and photo- graph frequency. When the mission is flown, the iPad is attached to the drone's remote controller and the iPad does the actual flying. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drone By Jim Meyers KEY POINTS While the first drones were either toys for chil- dren or employed by the military for spying on or attacking an enemy, today's technology allows drones to be used as a tool to solve problems in vineyards. Jim Meyers, who has a master's de- gree in computer science and a Ph.D. in viticul- ture, explains how drones work, their advantages as well as their problems. In a specific example of the information a drone can provide, a site inspection was done on a vineyard block using a drone with two cameras. An off-the-shelf camera for photos and videos produced maps showing large variability zones in vineyard floor health and vine size. On a second camera, the blue light captured by a normal camera was replaced with near infrared (NIR) light. The NIR light camera allowed the cre- ation of normalized difference vegetation index maps of the vineyard that identified areas of vari- ability less visible with standard photography. EDITOR'S NOTE This article originally appeared in the Sept. 29, 2017, edition of Véraison to Harvest, published by the Cornell Uni- versity Cooperative Extension. An iPad, an operator and a drone are the only tools needed to survey a New York vineyard.