Project Title: AgriFlyAI: An Autonomous UAV System Powered by an Enhanced YOLOv8-Based Edge AI Model for Real-Time Strawberry Detection and Crop Monitoring
Description:
Application of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems and the use of artificial intelligence in precision agriculture are increasing and are important tools for better crop monitoring, reduction of human labor, and enhancement of agricultural productivity. Although the above-mentioned challenges exist, real-time strawberry detection is still difficult under different illumination or unseen fruits and complicated backgrounds. This paper presents an edge artificial intelligence (AI) model improved by using the YOLOv8 model to detect strawberries and monitor them in real time, and introduces an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system for strawberry monitoring. The model to be used is optimized for the YOLOv8 model, with the addition of edge computing on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, autonomous flight control using a Pixhawk controller, and an intelligent dashboard for flight mission planning and crop analysis. To meet the requirement of detecting strawberry ripeness stages, plant health conditions, and common diseases under complex field environments, it is proposed that feature extraction methods be strengthened to generate better feature representations, multi-scale feature fusion methods be adopted to fuse the information from different scales, and lightweight attention mechanisms be introduced to achieve effective detection. The model was trained on more than 20,000 annotated images from 12 classes and tested based on the Precision, Recall, and mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics. Results from this experiment showed 90% Precision, 83% Recall, 88% mAP@50, and 74% mAP@50-95, with real-time inference at around 9 fps on Jetson Orin Nano, with no dependency on the cloud. The full AgriFlyAI suite also produces crop health analysis, disease hotspot maps, and crop yield predictions to aid data-informed farming decisions. The outcomes prove that the suggested model is an efficient, scalable, and practice-oriented solution to the problem of intelligent UAV-based precision agriculture.
Uploaded At: 2026-07-05 10:07:45