By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Over the past several years, drones have played an increasingly necessary role in ensuring that farmers can maintain high crop yields in an environmentally sustainable manner, the CEO of agricultural drone company Hylio said in an interview.
Starting with the primary use of small drones in agriculture as data-gathering tools about twenty years ago, the usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has expanded to incorporate material-application drones able to spreading fertilizer and chemicals to treat crop diseases and control pest infestations.
“Essentially there have been just a few general advancements within the drone space that make sustainable ag more possible,” said Arthur Erickson. The present generation of agricultural drones is “just getting so much more reliable, so I might say that there’s lots of strides in obstacle-detection and avoidance technology.”
For the smaller, camera-based drones, advancements in sensor technology throughout the last five years or so have increased the UAVs’ capability to collect data on necessary metrics corresponding to soil health, plant population health and identification of weeds. Multispectral sensors, capable to picking up data outside the narrower red-green-blue (RGB) band, “gives you pretty good high-resolution data in regards to the soil health, particularly in nutrient deficiencies,” he said.
While these light-weight data-gathering drones provide the farmer with the knowledge needed to nurture a healthy crop, the more robust and adaptable material-distributing UAVs serve because the workhorses in getting the job done.
This class of drone, through which Hylio specializes, are typically larger — 50 kilos or greater – and are able to carrying and dispersing either liquid or solid payloads onto crops to attain some form of yield-increase function or protective function, Erickson said.
“The applying style of drones has only been around for a really short time, relatively speaking. They only became popular here in america back in 2017 or 2018,” he said.
Since their introduction into the U.S., probably probably the most “needle-moving advancement” has been the substantial increase of their payload capability, which increases the variety of acres that may be serviced by a single drone, thus reducing the farmer’s costs and cutting the necessity for extra laborers.
“They began off relatively small, carrying only 2 to three gallons,” Erickson said. Currently, the biggest drone that Hylio producers carries a 20-gallon payload, giving it one in every of the biggest payload capacities available on the market.
“That’s generally where the high-water mark is without delay for payloads, but we’re seeing demand within the industry and we’re ourselves moving towards drones which are even larger, with 30- to 40-gallon capacities,” he said.
Because the drones’ payload capability has increased, advances in hardware and software technology has made these agricultural distribution drones much safer and more reliable to operate. Strides in obstacle-detection and avoidance technology have made it possible to operate the drones not only over open fields, but in addition above harder or hard-to-reach terrain.
“When you’ve gotten these large, expensive application drones, because the farmer, you now feel so much more comfortable just letting it on the market, even in somewhat wooded areas or areas with power lines or other obstacles crisscrossing the sector,” Erickson said. “Now it has the potential to detect and avoid those obstacles, thus saving you from a potentially quite expensive crash.”
As well as, advances in energy-storage technology over the past several years have greatly prolonged useful battery life. “Batteries are more energy-dense now,” he said. Previously, an operator could only get 100 to 200 cycles out of the batteries. “Now you may get three-, four-, five-hundred cycles, meaning your operating cost is coming down.”
Agricultural drones improve the sustainability of the farmer’s acreage in several ways. First because a drone is airborne, it may fly over a field through which a crop has already been planted, an awesome advantage over ground-based spraying.
Second, using the data-collected from a smaller, data-collection drone, the farmer can concentrate the spraying to the areas where they’re most needed, thus reducing the quantity of probably harmful chemicals released into the environment.
The usage of distribution drones can also be cheaper than hiring a 3rd party to are available in and spray a farmer’s fields using a plane or a helicopter. This permits the farmer to conduct as many as 10 intelligently designed, highly focused spraying sessions a season, moderately than two or three blanket sprayings per yr, Erickson said.
“The drones are an a-la-carte solution that you’ve gotten on demand right there at any given moment, supplying you with the liberty to be more strategic and intelligent with the inputs you set into your crops,” he said.
Agricultural drones represent a world market
Previously several years the marketplace for agricultural drones, long dominated by Chinese-manufactured DJI products, has grown to grow to be rather more competitive for U.S.-based corporations, corresponding to Hylio, and people produced in other Western nations, Erickson said.
“What’s really necessary about Hylio is that we’re essentially the one significant American-based manufacturer of those crop-protection drones.”
Globally, DJI leads the market, producing about 80 percent of the world’s agricultural and non-agricultural drones, but that market dominance is subject to alter, he said.
“The drone industry is comparatively recent. It seems that these Chinese corporations got ahead originally here, but that doesn’t mean that America or other Western countries or other countries generally, should just sit back and allow them to take the lead perpetually,” Erickson said. “I believe it’s really necessary that there may be competition in any marketplace, whether that be domestic or global.”
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