Team Uses Drones To Inspect Irrigation Canals for Japanese Rice Farms

Kenji Shimada, professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and his team of engineers are using unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, to detect damage to agricultural water canals in a town in Niigata, an agricultural district on the northwest coast of Japan's main island. These canals are essential for the rice farming economy in the region and total approximately 40,000 kilometers throughout Japan. Damage to the canals accumulates annually due to age, earthquakes and extreme weather. They can only be analyzed and repaired during the two-month dry season each year. Of these two months, one and a half of them are devoted to laborious inspection by technicians who walk along the canals to manually identify, measure and record damaged areas. This leaves only half a month for repairs. "40,000 kilometers are equivalent to the equatorial circumference of Earth, and the manual labor for inspecting and evaluating the condition of water canals is enormous," Shimada said.