Agricultural drones represent a new and much faster way to collect field data. The most compelling reason for using agriculture drones is that data is on-demand; whenever and wherever needed, agricultural drones can be easily deployed to gather up-to-the-minute information. These crop drones in the growing fields today are back-of-the-truck equipment, bringing advanced growers crucial information faster than ever before.

Agricultural drones permit better-than-satellite information on demand. Analyzing images with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) algorithms yields extremely accurate crop mapping, all without pilots, planes or satellites. Multiple sensor studies produce perfectly focused data, too, as RGB, red edge, near infrared and other spectral analysis tools can reveal crop health and maturity, soil moisture and environmental stress when and as required.

Especially in comparison with flight operations, agricultural drones provide highly specialized and detailed data at a significant cost savings, allowing operations to expand monitoring and analysis in a big way. Notably, drone operation has also become fairly simple thanks to self-guided flight. Current drone models are proving sturdy and reliable in the field as well, making them easy to integrate into the crop-scouting workflow. Field missions become highly time efficient, too, as agricultural drones are “launch and forget” tools, allowing management to multitask while the drone works on a robotic program.

A simplified process:

Initial Survey
Defining the edges of each field for the drone nav system by GPS is the basis for every operation. Once done, flight parameters are uploaded to the drone via wireless link. Surveys are only required for the first flight and are saved to the on-board system.

Flight
The agricultural drone launches and executes the full survey flight automatically, returning to the start point to land.

Upload
After a round of flights, upload the information for data processing.

Analyze
Within hours, you’ll get an email alert; your results are available for viewing and download.