Abstract

Facing up with the effects of climate change, increasing human population, reduction of natural resources, and degradation of soils the agricultural sector has the challenge of meeting the world's demand for food. In this scenario, the interest of scientific communities for the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in the agricultural sector has increased in recent years. The aim of this article is to provide a global view on how scientific communities interact and identify gaps and opportunities in research of UAV in the agricultural sector. The study reviewed the scientific publications of the Web of Science from 2000 to 2018 using a data-driven approach. According to specific search terms, the most relevant publications have been downloaded from specialized database and they have been analyzed from the point of view of bibliographic data through the VOSviewer software. Examining the network graphic of citations to describe the interaction and processing the terms of the titles and abstracts with the data mining techniques, in order to identify current trends research and gaps in the literature were identified. Scientific community is working to design technological platforms to support agriculture actors for making data-based decision schemes, where computational algorithms and visualization techniques are applied.

Key words: Agricultural innovation, technology applications, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), drones.