The Drone Industry’s Latest Win Could Be Big for Farming, Too
March 10, 2020 Being the only Part 107 FAA drone operator here at Meister Media Worldwide, I often get invited by the various editors of the many ag markets we cover to write something, anything, about drones.
I guess these little flying robots that started popping up all around the countryside back in 2012 are a pretty popular subject among growers at the moment.
Who knew, right?
The truth of the matter is drone hardware innovation in the ag space has been somewhat stagnant for the last few years. There had been huge leaps forward in 2019 in both last-mile drone delivery platforms and thermal sensor integrations for search and rescue applications, but ag has remained sort of stuck on the bench for the last season.
However, that’s not to say it’s been completely dead in terms of farm drones in the last few months.
There’s been some interesting new multispectral releases to the market (DJI’s P4 Multispectral, for one) recently, and the Aerovironment Quantix platform that’s been around for a few years and had a slight update for 2019 has achieved a level of autonomy that is intriguing for any farmer. Especially the grower who wants imagery but doesn’t really want to mess around with drones and pre-flight planning and all the nerdy nuts and bolts on the back end that go into making imagery useable.
But that brings me back to my coworkers here at MMW.
Right at this moment, I’d say the most intriguing development took place back in October, right around the time I was moderating a panel at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas: the U.S. release of the new Skydio 2.
Why is this new bird so noteworthy?
Skydio 2 leverages the highest levels of machine learning, edge computing and processing, and full 360-degree environment sensing I have witnessed thus far in a single UAV package. The drone launches and immediately starts scanning its environment for possible obstacles and hinderances, building a computer vision map of its new environment, much like the human brain does, in real time, constantly scanning and updating as the bird flies.
In lay terms, this pretty much makes the Skydio 2 un-crashable, which any drone pilot will tell you makes the product worth its weight in gold. And oh yeah, did I mention it is also made by a U.S.-based company?
But the real payoff: It takes autonomous operation to the absolute highest level anyone has ever witnessed before in a drone package. And all at about the same cost as a DJI Mavic 2 Pro, which has nowhere near the autonomous operation capabilities of Skydio 2, which can constantly adapt to and build an understanding of the world around it, and adjust its flight plan in real time while operating autonomously. That aspect of what Skydio has done is very interesting for the future of digital farming.
We’re already seeing tractors developed with similar technology. Once they become more commonplace, we’ll see spray drones that can operate autonomously and apply crop protection products with very little human intervention, all while capturing large swaths of agronomic data from overhead?
Now that, my friends, would be a true ag drone breakthrough.
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