SmartAgriHubs - Autonomous drone flight for crop inspection
As part of the bigger SmartAgriHubs project grant, a flagship innovation experiment was set up together with Robovision and Proximus, with the following goal: “ Reducing and optimizing spraying applications on crops by combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) with hyperspectral imaging, thus creating a supportive decision model to channel the hyperspectral data into task maps. “
Exobotic was responsible for the development, integration and execution of the autonomous drone flights needed to collect the data for analysis by Robovision. To this end, we developed a custom ground station to allow for automatic take-off and landing, with the possibility to charge the drone between flights. Of course, next to the electromechanical design of the ground station, a lot of work went into the positioning of the drone relative to the ground station for a smooth landing.
“The autonomous drone takeoff and landing solution of Exobotic is an important step towards truly autonomous drone flights, overcoming the current limitations imposed by the balance between weight and battery size.”