5 ms·

Good to be pushing the limits etc etc, but is this really at all close to being practical yet? Just think of the scale of NZ farms vs the DJI range. Unless the

Good to be pushing the limits etc etc, but is this really at all close to being practical yet? Just think of the scale of NZ farms vs the DJI range. Unless they can land on remote charging stations dotted about the terrain it's going to run out of power far too quickly to explore much of the farm aside from a brief flyover. Back of the envelope calc: if an avg NZ farm is 252 hectares [2], and we charitably assume it's square and it's about 6.3km for a trip round the perimeter, yet the DJI flies for 31 minutes at 25kph [1], so roughly 13km, it could only do ~two laps (without stopping and presumably not accounting for cross winds) It gets worse if the farm isn't square (as seems likely in NZ terrain) and it gets much worse when you considering that livestock farms are bigger still than the overall average. [1] https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info [2] http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/ http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/

dan-robertson 8y ago
I think the technology is still useful as it is. I think normally farmers wouldn’t take a sheepdog all the way around the perimeter of a farm like that. Instead they would drive to the part where the sheepdog is needed and do the work there. One would imagine a drone would be useful in this scenario too. I think the main advantage with the current limited range would be for driving animals (something that wouldn’t routinely require high speed or long distances but might take a long time) and more localised surveys. I can certainly imagine eg taking the quad bike to different parts of the farm and just sending the drone up to look at/round up the sheep.
taneq 8y ago
I don't think they'd try to patrol the entire property on a single battery. More likely just fly out to do a spot check, return to base, swap batteries, etc. If your options are ride a quad bike out there (navigating terrain, fences etc.) or fly straight there and back at 60km/h+ I imagine the drone is a far quicker way to keep an eye on things. You can keep a Spark in the air almost indefinitely (only landing to swap batteries) with three batteries if you don't mind charging them while they're hot (shortens the battery life a bit) so I'd imagine a Mavic Pro would be able to do as well or better.
7952 8y ago
And sheep farms can be very steep which would make terrain avoidance more difficult.

dan-robertson 8y ago

I think the technology is still useful as it is. I think normally farmers wouldn’t take a sheepdog all the way around the perimeter of a farm like that. Instead they would drive to the part where the sheepdog is needed and do the work there. One would imagine a drone would be useful in this scenario too. I think the main advantage with the current limited range would be for driving animals (something that wouldn’t routinely require high speed or long distances but might take a long time) and more localised surveys. I can certainly imagine eg taking the quad bike to different parts of the farm and just sending the drone up to look at/round up the sheep.

taneq 8y ago

I don't think they'd try to patrol the entire property on a single battery. More likely just fly out to do a spot check, return to base, swap batteries, etc. If your options are ride a quad bike out there (navigating terrain, fences etc.) or fly straight there and back at 60km/h+ I imagine the drone is a far quicker way to keep an eye on things. You can keep a Spark in the air almost indefinitely (only landing to swap batteries) with three batteries if you don't mind charging them while they're hot (shortens the battery life a bit) so I'd imagine a Mavic Pro would be able to do as well or better.

7952 8y ago

And sheep farms can be very steep which would make terrain avoidance more difficult.