Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
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Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#2True innovation happens in amazing places. I'm really excited to see the future of agriculture enhanced by robots and AI.
One Bay-area company doing awesome stuff, not mentioned in the article, is Blue River Technologies. They make lettuce crops (of all things, lettuce!) insanely efficient with AI and hyper-fast distributed systems computations. This stuff is so cool.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#3I have to point out that this article is not factually accurate. TerrAvion (YC W14), is actually crushing the whole electric drone market and switching people who hold 333 exemptions and own drones to using manned planes for collection tens of thousands of acres at a time.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#4I have to point out that this article is not factually accurate. TerrAvion (YC W14), is actually crushing the whole electric drone market and switching people who hold 333 exemptions and own drones to using manned planes for collection tens of thousands of acres at a time.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#5I have to point out that this article is not factually accurate. TerrAvion (YC W14), is actually crushing the whole electric drone market and switching people who hold 333 exemptions and own drones to using manned planes for collection tens of thousands of acres at a time.
http://www.terravion.com/blog/the-market-is-speaking-terravi...
That's neat to see - I had always expected large vehicles to dominate the surveillance space. Will you guys go unmanned when, 10 years from now, the FAA lets civilians fly Predator like UAVS? Also, what's your perspective on the commercial smallsat imagery market? I've long been of the view that large UAVs will wipe those guys out.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#6See also some of the cool work going on at UC Davis; e.g. a phenotyping robot for reconstructing various plant geometry on the fly:
http://ucanr.edu/sites/dcslaughter/UCDavis_High-throughput_P...
(Disclaimer: relative of PI.)
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.terravion.com/blog/the-market-is-speaking-terravi...
That's neat to see - I had always expected large vehicles to dominate the surveillance space. Will you guys go unmanned when, 10 years from now, the FAA lets civilians fly Predator like UAVS? Also, what's your perspective on the commercial smallsat imagery market? I've long been of the view that large UAVs will wipe those guys out.
Yes, someday TerrAvion might go unmanned, but as a former military drone unit commander, I both look forward to the day and think it is further off than people in the Valley think. We've had the technology for unmanned trains for 60 years and yet when all you care about is price per ton/passenger mile, sometimes an operator is the last part of the labor fraction to take out. Mapping is a similar price per pixel type operation.
Smallsats are cool, but they are really only attacking price and reliability of satellite--they aren't even close to say Pleaides or WorldView3 constellations on performance, let alone matching RapidEye for agriculture.
Regarding the disposition of the civilian mapping data market, I think if you look at what the military did in Iraq and Afghanistan the unlimited defense budgets of the 2000s might give an idea of what civilians of the 2020s will be doing. The satellites mostly got used by division and theater level staff to answer long term questions, say 20% of questions. Hand launched drones, which were ubiquitous in company storage rooms, but not in operations answered a few micro questions say 5% of aerial data needs. The remainder of planning questions got answered by air-breathing aircraft of one type or another. Not sure why the venture community has not largely not noticed this.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#8I'm life long friends with with family that owns a 80,000 acre grain and soybean farm, and they looked into drones last year or so for crop assessment, but found it wasn't really effective from either an analysis or price perspective. The drones didn't really have the range or endurance to properly sample the fields (we're talking fields of several square miles each), and the resolution of the camera just couldn't give you the detail you needed. It was basically just a waste.
Perhaps if there were more specific imaging sensors on the drones or something, you'd have something, but a simple visible light camera just doesn't reveal enough info.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#9I'm life long friends with with family that owns a 80,000 acre grain and soybean farm, and they looked into drones last year or so for crop assessment, but found it wasn't really effective from either an analysis or price perspective. The drones didn't really have the range or endurance to properly sample the fields (we're talking fields of several square miles each), and the resolution of the camera just couldn't gi…
> but a simple visible light camera just doesn't reveal enough info.
One would think that IR would be very useful in diagnosing plant types and crop coverage.
>80,000 acre grain and soybean farm
I misread that humorously as a '80,000 acre soylent green farm' somehow. Guess it's bedtime for me.
Re: Agricultural – fastest growing robotic sector
#10I'm doing work in venture capital with a specific focus on computer vision. I've looked into the agricultural robotics topic with some scrutiny. Here are some comments:
* feasibility of this new technology is due to the commoditization of three necessary components over the last few years: cameras (improved immensely in both quality and cost due to the smartphone revolution), drones/UAVs/small satellites themselves, and services like AWS that allow small enterprises to crunch huge amounts of geospatial data at little cost.
* there's good reason to believe that the commoditization of those components (i.e. availability and quality) will increase in the next few years.
* drones of the popular quadcopter type are a mixed bag -- their range is very limited because the batteries required to operate them are very heavy. This is tough because they have to survey huge areas. For large areas, many drones are required, which poses a significant overhead cost. However, what's nice about them is that they can be used with surgical precision: if something looks weird, drones can fly very close to the ground and take high-res pictures.
* conversely, what's nice about UAVs and small sats is that they can capture geospatial data on huge areas much more easily (though in lower resolution).
I think we're generally going to see a kind of two-tier approach, in which a high-altitude machine (a UAV mini-plane, or even higher up, a small satellite) does the broad aerial surveillance, and a low-altitude machine, i.e. a quadcopter drone, is sent out for random sampling to cross-reference the geospatial data, and for surgical investigation of abnormalities. The economic benefits of such a scheme could be quite significant for farmers.
I'm also looking forward to drones with more sophisticated sensors -- for example, heat or IR cameras. These are pretty rare on the market so far. Regrettably, they aren't being commoditized in the way that regular cameras are, so progress on this front may be a little slower.