Blogs

Recently I was approached about one of my previous blog posts on Vineyard Surveys by a Drone Startup based in San Francisco, Drone Deploy. In my previous blogs I’ve stated the importance of a whole system approach to UAV work with a smooth end-to-end flow. It’s not about the drone, or how sexy it is. It’s using the drone as a tool to get actionable data that can be used to improve your crop yields, reduce your survey times, in a sense make you work more efficiently with less workload. What Drone Deploy suggested is that they had taken the processing section of the workflow and automated it. From my experiences and from talking with other UAV operators, it’s clear flying and capturing useful images/data is 20% of the time, the rest of the 80% is data processing, analysis and decision making. However Mike Winn, CEO and founder (Jono Millin and Nicholas Pilkington are also founders) at Drone Deploy told me that they had devised a product that would take the data as the drone is flying, yes as it’s flying, and start processing as it’s flying, and 15 to 30 minutes after landing you would have all the processed data available. Really? This seemed too good to be true, as such I set off on this investigation to see how well Drone Deploys system worked. Blog post on Drone Deploy.