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Home All Big drones for future farming

Big drones for future farming

2019-11-14SPECTORSAll, Big Drones, Precision Agriculture

Drone4Agro (http://drone4agro.com), one of the partners in the SPECTORS project, focuses on developing drone technologies for the agricultural sectors. The expertise of Drone4Agro includes spraying drones for precision agriculture and docking stations for recharging and refilling of the drones.

 

Spraying drones

Understanding that small open field horticulturalist and greenhouse owner have different needs than larger crop producers, the goal of Drone4Agro is to build tailor-made agricultural drones for spraying and fertilizing crops.

Customers can choose between a normal-sized quadcopter and up to nine-meters width mega drone equipped with different types of spraying systems such as point sprayers and boom sprayer. By selecting different drone designs, the flight duration, flying speed and payload can be optimized for different applications in order to reduce costs. Currently, the company offers drones that can carry different equipment up to 80 kg with around 20 minutes of flight time, extendable to 1.5 hours if a range extender is used.

Quadcopter equipped with point sprayers

Agridrone Valck – custom made mega drone of 80 kg payload being tested

 

Docking stations

One challenge in agricultural drones at the moment is its payload limitation. Ir. Winfried Rijseenbeek, the CEO and founder of Drone4Agro, mentioned that agricultural drones should be able to accomplish tasks on the fields, as well as capable to extend their operating time by recharging and refilling without the need of a human operator. This idea initiated the development of the docking station technology that includes the software development for precise autonomous landing, auto-correction in windy conditions and the implementation of a scaled docking station for electric charging and liquid refilling.

Prototype of docking station for recharging the drone. Practical tests had shown a landing accuracy of around +/-15cm.

 

Other drone technologies

Drone4Agro is also conducting research in other drone technologies and applications that could assist search and rescue missions and perimeter surveillance. To ensure clear and useful visual information can be obtained by the drone during mission, a drone equipped with high lumen light source could come in handy especially for night missions or when the environment has limited light. Drone4Agro has successfully equipped a drone with 100,000 high lumen light source which has a flight time of 30 minutes. By combining this technology with an RGB or thermal camera, it is capable of various missions ranging from emergency, rescue, reconnaissance, and inspection.

 

A quadcopter equipped with 100,000 high lumen light source

Words about SPECTORS

Really the SPECTORS project helped a lot in the development of the company products. Cooperation with the other partners as universities and business stimulated knowledge exchange and to see developments useful in other sensor techniques that can be applied for drones. We have a good cooperation with the team of the Hochschule Rhein-Waal (HSRW). Another example is the work in weeds recognition done there that can lead to a biological spray drone that can identify weed and kill it in one go.
Ir. Winfried RijssenbeekDirector

Further readings

SPECTORS EUROPE. (2019). Interview of Ir. Winfried Rijssenbeek. [Online] Available at: https://youtu.be/6POfBMfTGB0, Accessed on 14th November, 2019.

[Latest update on 17th December, 2019]

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