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Image: Sensefly (modified)
Drone company Parrot is designing the GoProImage may be NSFW.
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for agriculture. They call it Sequoia, and it’s designed to help visualize both the visible and invisible aspects of agricultural inspection allowing farmers to analyze and respond to their crop’s health during growing season.
Weighing no more than 110 grams, Sequoia is a GoPro-like sensor that turns your average drone into a crop-analyzing flying machine. Sequoia captures the HD video that your eyes can see and the invisible wavelengths that your eye’s dismiss. Visible RGB video allows farmers to scout their land while the four multispectral sensors display colorful images based on crop health. In addition to analyzing what’s below, Sequoia features a top-facing sunshine sensor that can detect the levels of sunlight over a given area and calibrate the multispectral sensors to take weather factors such as cloudiness into consideration.
Agricultural inspection via drone is rising. The problem of getting image-capturing devices airborne has been solved with drones, but the actual costliness of said image-capturing devices remains unaltered. To fix this, Parrot has designed Sequoia to be half the price of similar multispectral sensors. Furthermore, Sequoia is a completely independent device that can attach to just about any drone. Data collecting performance will vary from drone to drone, but the beauty of Sequoia is that it doesn’t require an expensive setup.
Farmers can snap a Sequoia onto a 3DR Solo droneImage may be NSFW.
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and get the drone up in running in no time. It won’t be as fast as say a fixed-wing drone like SenseFly’s eBee Ag, but it’ll capture the same vital data. Data captured during flight is stored on 64 GB internal storage, and can later be transferred to software for processing into orthophotos and detailed maps displaying crop health.
Using photogrammetry software such as Pix4Dmapper, Sequoia’s high-res imagery can be processed into orthophotos and index maps showing crop health.
Crop health is important, but there’s a plethora of complimentary advantages to aerial imaging. Farmers can track nutrient deficiencies, optimize the use of pesticides, and control crop irrigation by locating areas where water is scarce. Combine all of this data together, and farmers can fine-tune their resources to boost crop yield and revenue. Crops can expect to see Sequoia flying in March.
Source: Parrot
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