Aerial Agriculture’s drone isn’t like every other agriculture drone. It has been developed with AI at the heart of everything it does, giving farmers and those with vast expanses of land more insight into their produce than others that simply photograph what’s below.
The drone itself looks just like a mini aeroplane rather than one of those you’d expect to see teenagers flying over your house at the weekend. This makes it more suited to flying long distances, meaning it can cover much bigger areas of land than other drones.
Its wingspan measures 3.2m, so it’s significantly bigger than a hobbyist drone, but it’s not the size that makes it super-intelligent, but the internal make-up and software.
It learns about your land every time it flies over, picking up more data it can use to provide you with detailed insights that can’t be picked up by other flying machines. It’s this information that make the Aerial Agriculture drone more valuable than others available on the market.
Information it picks up includes the wavelengths of light coming off the crops in the field. Using a spectrometer to gather this information, it can tell whether crops are healthy or not and therefore, whether the farmer needs to take action.
“We’re not just another drone company that’s coming in to do imagery of your field,” says Ali Ahmadi, Aerial Agriculture’s chief operating officer.
Aerial Agriculture is one of 600 companies that have been granted permission by the Federal Aviation uthority to fly over fields and gather information. Although the company is pretty new – it only started in 2015 – it already has contracts covering 30,000 acres and the industry is set to grow at a super-fast pace over the next ten years, making it a very valuable industry for drones in the future.