Drones For Agriculture

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Progeny Drone Inc., a Purdue-affiliated startup, has created software that rapidly converts aerial crop photos into useful information for plant breeding, crop modeling and precision agriculture.

Anthony Hearst, co-founder and CEO of Progeny Drone and Ph.D. candidate in agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University, says the agriculture industry has been overwhelmed trying to obtain actionable data about crop health and development in real time from unmanned aerial vehicles.

“Progeny Drone can do this fast with our software,” Hearst said. “Rather than taking days to weeks, we can do it in minutes, and it is very affordable. We don’t need to rely on supercomputers or cloud computing. We can do it on a laptop. This will help us provide a much faster turnaround time at a lower price than our competitors.”

Progeny Drone rapidly turns images into custom-zoned, quality-controlled growth and development metrics. The ability to quickly collect, interpret and analyze the data is vital in agriculture because field conditions can change rapidly, Hearst said.

Progeny Drone also can take previously collected data, even from previous growing seasons, and glean useful information. It can process image backlogs or new imagery and automatically extract images of research plots or management zones within minutes.

Katy Rainey, co-founder and chief technology officer of Progeny Drone and assistant professor of plant breeding and genetics in Purdue’s Department of Agronomy, say the hype about drones has led many crop researchers and producers to buy drones without knowing exactly what to do with the images to get a return on their investment. Progeny Drone can solve that problem by quickly providing plant growth and development metrics.

“We can provide growth and development metrics that are relevant, whether that be for plant breeding, crop modeling or precision agriculture,” Hearst said. “We can quantify different traits that are valuable for selection of the best varieties or other physical properties related to crop health and yield potential that will be useful for field management.”

Source : https://www.purdue.edu/