The current mainstream approach of using manual measurements and visual inspections for crop lodging detection is inefficient, time-consuming, and subjective. An innovative method for wheat lodging detection that can overcome or alleviate these shortcomings would be welcomed. This study proposed a systematic approach for wheat lodging detection in research plots (372 experimental plots), which consisted of using unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for aerial imagery acquisition, manual field evaluation, and machine learning algorithms to detect the occurrence or not of lodging. UAS imagery was collected on three different dates (23 and 30 July 2019, and 8 August 2019) after lodging occurred. Traditional machine learning and deep learning were evaluated and compared in this study in terms of classification accuracy and standard deviation. For traditional machine learning, five types of features (i.e. gray level co-occurrence matrix, local binary pattern, Gabor, intensity, and Hu-moment) were extracted and fed into three traditional machine learning algorithms (i.e., random forest (RF), neural network, and support vector machine) for detecting lodged plots. For the datasets on each imagery collection date, the accuracies of the three algorithms were not significantly different from each other. For any of the three algorithms, accuracies on the first and last date datasets had the lowest and highest values, respectively. Incorporating standard deviation as a measurement of performance robustness, RF was determined as the most satisfactory. Regarding deep learning, three different convolutional neural networks (simple convolutional neural network, VGG-16, and GoogLeNet) were tested. For any of the single date datasets, GoogLeNet consistently had superior performance over the other two methods. Further comparisons between RF and GoogLeNet demonstrated that the detection accuracies of the two methods were not significantly different from each other (p > 0.05); hence, the choice of any of the two would not affect the final detection accuracies. However, considering the fact that the average accuracy of GoogLeNet (93%) was larger than RF (91%), it was recommended to use GoogLeNet for wheat lodging detection. This research demonstrated that UAS RGB imagery, coupled with the GoogLeNet machine learning algorithm, can be a novel, reliable, objective, simple, low-cost, and effective (accuracy > 90%) tool for wheat lodging detection.