Drone-in-a-box crop scouting trials at PTI

PONTIAC, Ill. — An all-in-one drone system recently released into the marketplace is among the latest research projects at Precision Technology Institute that focuses on crop scouting.

The system’s robotic ground station safely stores a drone when it’s not in use. Once the drone is activated, the box opens and serves as a launch pad, allowing the drone to take off from inside the box.

After the drone has completed its programmed mission, it flies back to the box and lands autonomously.

“One of the things we want to do at this farm is test new technology. It doesn’t matter if it’s Precision Planting, AGCO or any other new technology, I want it on this farm to share with growers whether it works or not, at least on our farm,” said Jason Webster, PTI director and Precision Planting commercial agronomist, of the unmanned aerial vehicles at a recent field day.

“I call it the jack-in-the-box. This is where we bring in a UAV. We call them ‘unmanned ag vehicles.’

“This bird lives in the jack-in-the-box and on my computer I can set up a flight mission where this bird will fly over our trials we have out the field. I can set the day, I can set the time, and the whole role of this is to fly our fields weekly.

“This is autonomous and whatever time I tell it to go, the box opens up. It has a weather station on it to monitor if it’s too windy to fly or if it’s raining. If the answer is no to both of those questions, the box opens up and the bird shoots out of the box 150 feet into the air.”

The UAV can be programmed to fly from 70 to 150 feet above fields. When the flight is completed, the drone will land back in the box where it charges itself. Once the 30-minute charge is complete, it’s ready to fly another field.

Cloud-To-Computer

The jack-in-the-box is equipped with a camera and the photos are sent through the cloud and can be processed quickly on a computer.

“Can I use this as a farmer, find a problem in the field and go fix it and make yield or lose less yield, depending how you want to look at it? Right now, I don’t have an example I can give you where that happens. We’re looking at this to see how a farmer would use it,” Webster said.

“I really wish I would have had this when the corn was coming up out of the ground because I think we could have done stand establishment with this bird. That would help me with replant decisions and things like that and really help determine what my final stand was in the field. I missed the window.”

He also hopes to use it as a tool to scout for tar spot, gray leaf spot, northern leaf blight and other diseases.

“We’re trying to learn from it. We’ll see where this thing goes and see if there’s any profitability with this,” he said.

“I do think crop scouting is one of the biggest problems we have in the industry because nobody wants to go do it. I got corn pollinating out here and it’s warm and humid today. Do you guys want to go walk a cornfield with me?

“Most people’s version of scouting is just driving by the field. You’ll slow down a little bit, but you won’t get out of the truck. This is flying over the top of the field and hopefully we can see more than what we can with just a pickup truck.”

Webster added he’d like to have thermal imagery available on the system to scout for problems in the drip irrigation system.

“The thermal imagery would find it because the thermal is looking for heat. If there’s a water break it will show up as a cooler area and it would direct us to that spot and fix it,” he said. “More to come on this in the future.”