Purpose-Intended Modification of a Conventional Sprayer Machine for Application in Precision Agriculture

The application of precision agriculture (PA) in the management of agricultural practices is increasingly widespread, especially in crops with higher income such as vineyards. The organization of agricultural operations conducted with precision approaches, provides that the machines may have the information collected from previous years (yield and quality of preceding productions), from surveys prior to agricultural practice (aerial or terrestrial drones, satellite maps) or from on-the-go surveys. The possibility of improving this information depends on the availability of machines capable of distributing inputs to the crop in variable rate (VR) mode. Moreover, in crop protection treatments there is the need to greatly improve reaching the target to avoid dispersion of chemicals in the environment. In this paper, a study was carried out to design and apply a machine able to distribute plant protection products, modifying some of its mechanical parts to obtain a modular effect capable of supporting the variability of a prescription map for variable-rate distributions. A conventional sprayer machine has been equipped with a prototype device able to varying the air outlet section and the tilt of the fan blades, to have modular airflows during the distribution of the product in the vineyard. The results from different configurations were statistically elaborated to verify their possible correspondence with the clusters of prescription maps based on the canopy index or spectral indices.