Smart Farming With Drones and AI

Hamburg, 10/14/2021 – Within the next months, as the soil gets cooler and the air gets humid, plant diseases and pest plants will be a hassle for many farming organizations. Growers need to observe the spread of diseases to take countermeasures, and plant breeders need to develop new, more tolerant varieties resistant to diseases that affect yields. Using high-resolution drone imaging combined with Artificial Intelligence, the detection of, e.g., leaf spot disease symptoms can proceed faster and even automated.

Smart Farming, meaning the optimization of work processes with digital solutions and data, is considerably growing. Field robots for sowing seeds, drones for surveying, or automated feed distribution for cows are no longer unusual. However, the potential of drones in this sector has not yet been exploited. Because of that, the tech-startups FlyNex and Pheno-Inspect worked on a solution for identifying plant diseases as soon as possible, mapping different plant species in the field, scoring plant conditions, etc.

From Drone to Dashboard

The main goal of bringing tech to agriculture in this case: Drones are taking high-resolution images of field areas with a special camera. Image data will be analyzed by the AI-powered software of Pheno-Inspect to detect, e.g., plant diseases, weed, number of grains, etc., in a short time. The farm receives a “live map” of the condition of the respective areas on their own map.

Compared to the typical process, where workers perform this task by actually walking through the field and identify or count by “hand”, farmers could benefit from time and cost savings, especially from a higher yield. Early detection of plant diseases or pest plants by drones allows faster and earlier countermeasures. Thus, the loss of the output is significantly reduced.

Automated and Integrated Data Measurement

The deployment of drones has a key long-term advantage. Once a flight mission is planned on the FlyNex Enterprise Suite and the flight pattern is recorded, the specific routes can be repeated as often as needed. The devices fly automatically and create desired imagery for the AI-engine of Pheno-Inspect. By automating the scan of large areas with drone images in high resolution or even with multispectral sensor technology, precise data can be collected and analyzed in just a few hours. This is crucial, for example, for active ingredient management and ultimately for continuous yield increases. For the first time, drones allow it to deploy automated image AI on a large scale, providing agriculture with essential information quickly and cost-effectively.

“The widespread use of drones and AI technology in agriculture is no longer a vision of the future. Not least, this is due to increasing challenges such as climate change and a fast-growing demand. Without the support of technology, agriculture cannot keep up. Secondly, the tangible benefits of cost and time savings are obvious,” said Andreas Dunsch, CEO and co-founder of FlyNex.

With the leading commercial drone project management software in Europe, FlyNex enables companies and organizations worldwide to use unmanned aerial systems for effective data collection. Every step of the data collection process can be managed on the platform, from the initial planning over flying to evaluating the captured image and measurement data with 3^rd-party software like the one from Pheno-Inspect.

The German start-up Pheno-Inspect provides state-of-the-art image processing software optimized for the agricultural sector for the fully automatic evaluation by using Artificial Intelligence. The algorithm can adapt to each use case individually and be made available to any farmer worldwide.

More information and a free demo of the solution can be found at https://www.flynex.io/agriculture/.

About FlyNex

FlyNex, based in Leipzig, Hamburg, and San Francisco, is the leading software solution for commercial drone projects. Through its own cloud platform, FlyNex covers the full range of commercial applications for data collection by unmanned aerial systems.

FlyNex’s solution enables companies and organizations to digitally capture asset, facility, and building data using drones. The full integration of drones and Artificial Intelligence helps companies not only to collect data, but also to analyze it automatically.

FlyNex is successfully used as a drone management solution by renowned companies and technology leaders in the construction, real estate, energy, and aviation sectors. In addition, FlyNex is involved in innovation projects across Europe for the successful integration of drones, e.g., for medical transport, intelligent air traffic management, or air cab navigation.

More information at: http://www.flynex.io

PDF Version: 2022-24- 10 – Smart Farming with Drones and AI