Capitalising on Drone Swarming Tech in Agriculture
Andrew Dedman is Director and Operations Manager at Stratus Imaging, an imagery services provider from West Australia for the agricultural industry. In a recent Soar Cast, he explained how Stratus Imaging became the first Western Australian company certified to fly five drones in a swarm formation and how he uses these to capture multispectral imagery to asses crop health.
Drones became adopted quickly by the agricultural sector. Farmers were quick to recognize the potential of drones in order to compliment current agricultural workflows and realize efficiency. Using a Phantom III equipped with a multispectral camera, Dedman and his business partner Jonathan Smith started providing crop health to farmers, which marked the start of Stratus Imaging as a company in 2014.
What sets Stratus Imaging apart from competitors, is the fact that they were the first company in Western Australia to become government certified for drone swarm operation. However, the process in order to get this certification started long before Stratus Imaging got involved. For two years, the manufacturer of the XAG drone, used by Stratus Imaging, has been demonstrating Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) that five drones could be operated safely with one pilot. Dedman: “XAG is Chinese-owned drone manufacturer. When they started in 2007, they were the biggest drone manufacturer around and I´ve used their drones throughout the country. It’s well-established, well-engineered equipment that’s built to last”.
Dedman discusses how his initial crop health work has diversified into a wide range of services over time;
Darren Smith: Can you tell us about current projects at Stratus Imaging?
Andrew Dedman: Most of today’s work is in precision agriculture. Our core business at the moment is providing plot-level statistics and analysis to researchers. We are flying many small plot research trials that are planned around the country, where seed breeders and chemical trials are provided. Although small, these are all highly detailed. Other work includes horticulture and viticulture, where crop health for vineyards is provided, among other things such as emergency accounts.
At the beginning of 2019, Dedman was approached by Landmark, a big agronomy company to bring spray drones into the agricultural market and get the required documentation to fly up five drones in a swarm formation. As part of this process, Dedman was required to do a five-day training to manage and coordinate five drones safely, consisting of two parts: “first, I got to operate the drones manually in a single formation, so without the assistance of an automatic system. The second part involved flying with an automated system under different scenarios, for example moving one drone to a safe location when there’s a sudden aircraft coming at you”.
Having the required documentation to fly five drones with only operator has multiple efficiency benefits: not only is there only one operator for five drones needed in instead of five, but intelligent flight planning enables an operator to operate quickly when drones return one by one, instead of all at the same time and change batteries and chemicals. The XAG drones used by Dedman weigh up to 40 kilos, have a wingspan of 2 meters and can fly 20 minutes with a payload of 15 liters of fertilizers. Because drones need to be flown within line of sight, they can be controlled within 2 kms of the location of the pilot.
During the podcast, Dedman explained how the safety mechanism works that brings the drone swarm back on the ground with one push on a button;
Darren Smith: Is there a panic button for these drones and how does it work?
Andrew Deadman: Yes, there’s a button on the side of the controller that causes the drones to land safely on the spot within five seconds. So it’s almost gamified.
Dedman explains how a flight map for drone is created before a spraying job. First, the boundaries of the land that is going to be sprayed are defined with the farmer. This is done by marking the four boundaries, using an RTK or rover station, after which the flight software puts run lines of 2.5–3m apart. Next, each drone is assigned to those individual runs and the amount of chemicals that are sprayed is decided, which dependent of the droplet size of the chemical one is spraying, combined with the speed and height of the drone.
Stratus Imaging also does multispectral image analysis, which requires the use of multispectral cameras. These break up the red, blue and green of the light spectrum, as well as adding near and far-infrared bands, which enables looking at crop problems before you can physically see them with your eyes, adds Dedman: “you would look at a field and think that’s perfectly healthy, nice and green. But under multispectral or near-infrared imagery, you can see areas of the crops that are not performing well. A farmer can use that information to do some ground-truthing and apply a chemical. So it’s like getting ahead of the game”.
It’s not a coincidence that so many farmers are now using drones for spraying crops, says Dedman;
Darren Smith: Why are drone being used instead of tractors for applying fertilizers?
Andrew Deadman: that’s because driving over the ground with a tractor is a big problem in agriculture: it shakes the plants, which causes them to fall off. So the less you can drive on your field, the better. And if you can spray your crop without even getting near, it will save on your yield in the long run. An additional benefit of using drones is there’s a good ROI as a result of a higher efficiency, because drones can replace manual labor.
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