Flying For Aerobotics
Who is Aerobotics and what do we do?
Aerobotics works with the agriculture industry to transform everyday farming operations with technology that supports smarter business decisions and ensures a sustainable future. Our Aeroview platform combines weekly satellite data, drone imagery, and scout information to track farm performance on a per-tree and zone basis, allowing growers to take a data-driven approach when optimizing the health of their farm.
Our software uses machine learning to process drone imagery and extract Tree Insights that include tree health, age, counts, volume, transpiration rates and more.
We need our drone partners to capture and upload this drone imagery to our online platform.
What hardware do you need?
The orchard mapping flights require both visual and multispectral imagery to be captured simultaneously. The hardware requirements for these mapping flights are:
- Orchard mapping standard – Any of the DJI Phantom 4 Pro, Inspire, and Matrice ranges mounted with a MicaSense multispectral camera. Or the DJI Mavic 3 Multispectral drone with a built in visual and multispectral camera.
- Orchard mapping thermal – We have recently introduced a thermal insights product which picks up transpiration rates at a per tree level. For this, we require any of the DJI Matrice range drones mounted with a MicaSense Altum multispectral camera.
We require data to be collected as follows
- We need the visual and multispectral imagery collected in the same flight. That means you need two cameras on board: a high-resolution visual camera and a multispectral camera (listed above).
- The RGB camera has to be a minimum of 15MP as we use the visual images for tree counts.
- The multispectral camera enables us to provide metrics for health, volume, transpiration and other per tree analytics to our clients.
How do you as a drone partner fit in?
- Our client will request a drone service for their farm.
- Our drone operations team will obtain all the necessary information and contact one of our drone partners in the area with the information and match the client's drone service request with the Drone Partner.
- Once matched, our drone operations team will assign the drone service request to the drone partners' profile.
- Once assigned, the drone partner will be able to view the farm on their Aeroview account page.
- The drone partner will be provided with all the information required to arrive at the correct farm, on the correct date and time, and fly the requested blocks while keeping our drone operations team updated. The drone partner will be required to contact the customer when en route to the farm.
- Once the collection of the drone imagery is complete, the drone partner will upload the data to our platform using the upload link in their pilot profile. Once all the requested blocks have been uploaded, the link will disappear from the profile.
- Once the upload is complete, the drone partner can invoice Aerobotics for the work completed using the allocated ‘purchase order’ number provided by the drone operations team.