4 ms·
If they're fuel powered drones, they need to refuel. Plus that's potentially expensive to operate depending how many you need and how heavy they are.
by eloff 6y ago
If they're fuel powered drones, they need to refuel. Plus that's potentially expensive to operate depending how many you need and how heavy they are.
- GauntletWizard 6y agoThere's probably something to be said for hard-wired drones here. The weight of the cable is something you have to contend with, but with a physical wire you can run a larger drone longer.
- eloff 6y agoHow is that better than a wheeled drone dragging a giant orange extension cord behind it? I'm not sure that's a great idea either, but flying brings more problems than it solves in this problem space.
- GauntletWizard 6y agoGiven that the plants are on the ground, I imagine not sweeping over them with an extension cable would be an obvious advantage. Still, you could work with suspended powerlines as easily for the big-box drone as with tractors, which brings me to another (probably dumb) question: Why has nobody built a landline electric tractor?
- ravel-bar-foo 6y agoFarmers sweep things along the field all the time. The standard farming sprinkler is supplied by pipes / hoses which are bridged above crop height between wheeled towers. As the spinkler works its way in a circle on the field around the water supply, the towers roll over a negligible amount of crop.
- drdaeman 6y ago> landline electric tractor Well, there are some robots that travel on aerial lines, typically used for cable inspection. Here's a quick search result: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/expliner-robot-inspects-high-voltage-lines https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...