We need to survey about 23,000+ Hectares of agriculture land and wondering what drone options we got given
(a) We have to survey really large area and small amount of time.
(b) We need to scan whole area say 3-4 times in a 8 months, over the season of crop to record growth.
(c) RGB + NDVI camera is good enough for now.
(d) Drone which is easy to repair, as I am sure there will be many crashes during operations..
Would it make more sense for to assemble it our own given we would need bunch of them, and we would need quick turn around time in case of repair/crash...
Replies
Joe, can you give an idea of price for a typical agricultural package?
Hi RG,
we are a remote sensing service company and use a UAS similar to the E384 we build it our self.
we we work with a teem of agriculture guys from the academy that has a proven cases/ work of increasing crops
we also provide a build, training and support service for this costumers local here in Israel and also abroad.
our systems can do servay up to 4,500 Hectares per day and the computer analysis can take also time but I believe you already know that.
currently we are developing a UAV similar to the Skywallker X8 made from carbon fiber for low wight and long flight time.
feel free to contact me direct for more information bennys@agrimapic.com
cheers
Ok. If you have a big budget..... then you can find drones that do whan you want.
But... you start with a Event airframe... so i thougt your budget is not 30.000 us dolars.
I fly both, manned and unmanned aircrafts. if you can have a manned aircarft near your field, then i can tell you how to buid a platform with almost the same hardware than a uav and make profesional jobs with a low budget.
If you use a uav to do the job reliable and minimizisg rosks then you need 3 man on the field. even with a solution as the ebee you need at least 2 man.
But.... if you do it in a manned aircraft, you rent the airplane with a pilot, so you dont have to worry about that person. you can do all the rest.
PS. Hola Jose !!.
Me gustaria comunicarme con vos. Yo tambien soy argentino y quisiera conversar con vos. Gracias.
Un gusto Martín, en cualquier momento.
Ruchit, do you have any resolution requirements and could you clarify the RGB + NGB requirement? A couple more things to consider are:
1) That 1000 acre E384 spec you mentioned is for 5cm/pixel - we don't normally fly any higher than that but anecdotally a customer has used a single E384 to collect 1800Ha in a day at 8cm/pixel. I wouldn't bet on that day in and out for months on end, but demonstrates some feasibility.
2) The E384 only carries one camera at a time in stock configuration. If you need both RGB and NDVI (NGB or NIR or multispectral) that will likely double the collection time. Our NDVI cameras would get NIR, G, B but not the red channel. Adding an RGB camera to the plane is possible but will affect flight time. Alternatively a multispectral camera like a RedEdge would get all the proper bands at low weight, but their lower resolution and (not sure, but I'm guessing likely) narrower field of view will require lower flying and higher sidelap to achieve the same resolution, which will affect area coverage again.
Definitely a multi-faceted problem! Hope this info helps.
@Darius you may be correct about the cost. It's not my point to argue for drones here. Just relating my own experience with drone surveying and building drones. It's pretty inexpensive to build a drone and if you can 'do it yourself', (which is the point of this website), then you can save a bundle of money. I have a friend that used to be in the helicopter surveying / video business and drones put him out of business. He now fly's cargo planes.
I tried to compute an estimate for your spec, at 5cm/pixel, using the GoPro camera, (1440x960, 12MP), assuming down-facing camera with drone flying at 30m altitude, is 60m x 48m of ground per photo, so at 20m/s flight speed, one picture every 40m to get overlap, one picture every 2 seconds. Aprox 1200 sq/m per second, so 8 seconds per hectare, approx 450 hectares per hour.
This is just a rough guess, so about 52 hours of flight time assuming perfect conditions. Accounting for unknowns, crashes, etc... double it to 100 hours flight time.
@Patrick,
5cm x 5 cm /pixel means 10cm x 10 cm /pixel in overlap mode.
Better resolution is offered by Google Maps imaginery for many regions on free basis
100 hours flight time doubles to 200 hours ( battery replacement, SD card replacement,
lens cleaning)
5 hours flight/ day, so job is done in 40 days
If insolation level matters, early morning images don't match late afternoon images.
If your drone crashes you need to order spare parts, wait 2-3-7-30 days (India)
Amazon delivery per drone not offered for India yet.
Get faulty, damaged parts replaced.
So job can be done within 3 months time limit.
Manned aircraft + cameras array can cut costs by half vs.
2 drone operators/ pilots + 1 service man, hired at T$5/ month x 3 months
T$50 + drone + service shop + parts
You can spend the same money to buy/ hire small manned aircraft to do that job within 1 week's time
@Ben, excuse me, but I don´t agree that Darius Jack is exaggerating. I am not in favour of manned vs. unmanned, but I think his estimation is pretty accurate given the little information we have about this project.
It surprises me reading everyone throw logistic options without knowing the details of the project: Which is the purpose of the mission? Is there a single set of images or a series needed? what exactly is that he/they want to see from the imagery?, and most important: which is the adequate resolution? This last factor makes a huge difference in terms of acquisition times, manpower and computer horsepower when processing.
Thanks Jose (and others) for raising very valuable questions, helping us fine tune our thinking for executing this very large project. At this stage we would like to showcase that we can handle/survey large areas and effectively categorize a single crop (likely wheat) into three categories good, sick/stressed and dead, geo-tagged so that we can pin-point farm location. Any other information gathered would be nice but not required at this point.
We plan to create time series over the season to show how things are progressing, say 3 full surveys over the season (~6 month for wheat).
Hope this helps. Would love further feedback/suggestions from community.
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