It has it's place, and I have seen very promising results.    I look forward to a day when I can buy decent sets of camera's

However, the reason most hyper-spectral "indexes" work is simply because the non-visual spectra have less associated noise due to background emission, less scatter, or less overall sensitivity to time-of-day.    There is not a whole lot of additional information (that we know about) just simply less noise and easier to normalize. 

What can be done - cheaply - is removing the "hot mirror" from any standard camera.  There are several companies who make money reselling these stripped consumer cameras. 

We need more work on standard reflectors and - potentially - a standard emitter like a scanning laser on low flying UAV.