Earlier this month, Air & Space / Smithsonian Magazine published an excellent profile on American Robotics, MassTLC member and creator of “the first practical drone for farmers.”
As author Tim Wright writes in the piece, “Agricultural drones could have a huge impact on farming by drastically cutting the price of crop imaging, which can be critical to farmers hoping to spot or diagnose problems before they become irreversible. What makes this vineyard flight unusual is that there was no human involved at all. Every aspect of the flight—evaluating flying conditions, lifting off and flying over the field, landing, recharging the battery, and uploading the imagery—happened autonomously. By letting the drone figure out everything on its own, American Robotics has taken crop monitoring to a new level. The result is Scout, a quadcopter-based autonomous flight system currently in beta testing, with initial real-world tests anticipated in 2019.”
Read the full article, The Flying Farmhand: This agricultral drone requires no human supervision at all, for more on the details and potential of this technology.
Check out the new drone in action, below.
INTRODUCING SCOUT from AMERICAN ROBOTICS on Vimeo.
