
Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector - rezist808
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329273
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jonathankoren
I'm life long friends with with family that owns a 80,000 acre grain and
soybean farm, and they looked into drones last year or so for crop assessment,
but found it wasn't really effective from either an analysis or price
perspective. The drones didn't really have the range or endurance to properly
sample the fields (we're talking fields of several square miles each), and the
resolution of the camera just couldn't give you the detail you needed. It was
basically just a waste.

Perhaps if there were more specific imaging sensors on the drones or
something, you'd have something, but a simple visible light camera just
doesn't reveal enough info.

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Amir6
I would like to have a conversation with you or them to convince them
otherwise. I have been operating my own ag robotics company for 2 years and
have contracts with biggest ag producers in Canada. 80,000 sounded big but not
as big as biggest producers of wheat or corn!

~~~
fanquake
I'd be interested in hearing your arguments/use cases for drones over broad-
acre properties, we've got(generally wheat) producers here with properties >
150'000 acres.

~~~
Amir6
shoot an email to "amirbeta" on outlook and we will have a discussion.

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johnloeber
I'm doing work in venture capital with a specific focus on computer vision.
I've looked into the agricultural robotics topic with some scrutiny. Here are
some comments:

* feasibility of this new technology is due to the commoditization of three necessary components over the last few years: cameras (improved immensely in both quality and cost due to the smartphone revolution), drones/UAVs/small satellites themselves, and services like AWS that allow small enterprises to crunch huge amounts of geospatial data at little cost.

* there's good reason to believe that the commoditization of those components (i.e. availability and quality) will increase in the next few years.

* drones of the popular quadcopter type are a mixed bag -- their range is very limited because the batteries required to operate them are very heavy. This is tough because they have to survey huge areas. For large areas, many drones are required, which poses a significant overhead cost. However, what's nice about them is that they can be used with surgical precision: if something looks weird, drones can fly very close to the ground and take high-res pictures.

* conversely, what's nice about UAVs and small sats is that they can capture geospatial data on huge areas much more easily (though in lower resolution).

I think we're generally going to see a kind of two-tier approach, in which a
high-altitude machine (a UAV mini-plane, or even higher up, a small satellite)
does the broad aerial surveillance, and a low-altitude machine, i.e. a
quadcopter drone, is sent out for random sampling to cross-reference the
geospatial data, and for surgical investigation of abnormalities. The economic
benefits of such a scheme could be quite significant for farmers.

I'm also looking forward to drones with more sophisticated sensors -- for
example, heat or IR cameras. These are pretty rare on the market so far.
Regrettably, they aren't being commoditized in the way that regular cameras
are, so progress on this front may be a little slower.

~~~
fanquake
"can capture geospatial data on huge areas much more easily"

What are you referring to as a "huge" area? All the work I'm seeing done with
drones has been limited to ~700ha/day, if you've got perfect conditions.
Normally it's much less.

What do you think drones with heat or IR cameras are most applicable too? When
we've got machinery mounted sensors such as a biomass/NDVI camera or a weed-
seeker, and the machinery has to make a pass over the field anyways, why not
have those sensors onboard the machine? We're seeing Weed-seekers pay for
themselves in the first year of use.

~~~
infinite8s
That comment was referring to the use of UAVs or small satellites for broad
surveillance (but at a lower resolution).

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eslaught
See also some of the cool work going on at UC Davis; e.g. a phenotyping robot
for reconstructing various plant geometry on the fly:

[http://ucanr.edu/sites/dcslaughter/UCDavis_High-
throughput_P...](http://ucanr.edu/sites/dcslaughter/UCDavis_High-
throughput_Phenotyping/)

(Disclaimer: relative of PI.)

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tuberry
SV ag tech conference at CHM on May 6. If anyone is interested in this, or
other agriculture technology.
[http://www.svagtech.org](http://www.svagtech.org)

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terravion
I have to point out that this article is not factually accurate. TerrAvion (YC
W14), is actually crushing the whole electric drone market and switching
people who hold 333 exemptions and own drones to using manned planes for
collection tens of thousands of acres at a time.

~~~
terravion
[http://www.terravion.com/blog/the-market-is-speaking-
terravi...](http://www.terravion.com/blog/the-market-is-speaking-terravion-
collects-more-acres-every-week-than-electric-drones-do-in-year)

~~~
zevets
That's neat to see - I had always expected large vehicles to dominate the
surveillance space. Will you guys go unmanned when, 10 years from now, the FAA
lets civilians fly Predator like UAVS? Also, what's your perspective on the
commercial smallsat imagery market? I've long been of the view that large UAVs
will wipe those guys out.

~~~
terravion
Yes, someday TerrAvion might go unmanned, but as a former military drone unit
commander, I both look forward to the day and think it is further off than
people in the Valley think. We've had the technology for unmanned trains for
60 years and yet when all you care about is price per ton/passenger mile,
sometimes an operator is the last part of the labor fraction to take out.
Mapping is a similar price per pixel type operation.

Smallsats are cool, but they are really only attacking price and reliability
of satellite--they aren't even close to say Pleaides or WorldView3
constellations on performance, let alone matching RapidEye for agriculture.

Regarding the disposition of the civilian mapping data market, I think if you
look at what the military did in Iraq and Afghanistan the unlimited defense
budgets of the 2000s might give an idea of what civilians of the 2020s will be
doing. The satellites mostly got used by division and theater level staff to
answer long term questions, say 20% of questions. Hand launched drones, which
were ubiquitous in company storage rooms, but not in operations answered a few
micro questions say 5% of aerial data needs. The remainder of planning
questions got answered by air-breathing aircraft of one type or another. Not
sure why the venture community has not largely not noticed this.

~~~
zevets
I think VCs are scared by the sensible business plan and the larger capital
costs. Drones also get a pass from scrutiny as VCs get excited about investing
in the platform, which allows VCs to project their 100x dreams.

I would guess your biggest challenge is sales - convincing farmers that they
need this. Is this true? Also - out of curiosity, what do you fly?

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martian
True innovation happens in amazing places. I'm really excited to see the
future of agriculture enhanced by robots and AI.

One Bay-area company doing awesome stuff, not mentioned in the article, is
Blue River Technologies. They make lettuce crops (of all things, lettuce!)
insanely efficient with AI and hyper-fast distributed systems computations.
This stuff is so cool.

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zjm5066
How Agriculture Majors Are Going To Save The World
[http://www.buzzfeed.com/zjm5066/how-agriculture-majors-
are-g...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/zjm5066/how-agriculture-majors-are-going-to-
save-the-world-290fe)

