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| The quadcopters have software that handle all the required interaction to keep stable in the air. You basically just tells it to go up, down, forward, right, and it just does it. If they fall over upside down, they will automatically recover to the proper up-down orientation. Not all do that, each manufacturer tries to distinguish themselves with a smarter piloting software, but this software is more and more commonly available as open source.
It's still a pioneer technology, far from being an appliance yet, so a hacker/mechanic mind is still pretty much required.
For instance hacking a cheap digital camera or more expensive SLR to turn it into an infrared camera.
Then even when you have infrared pictures, the software to exploit the data is just not there. You may need a second pass with a normal camera to check if that orange spot is from a pest or water stress, and eventually manual scouting.
How do you correlate these maps with the precision maps from the combine?
What do you do when you have several fields or farms miles across?
It will get there eventually, but the companies that drive the effort seem to be involved in expensive do-it-all solutions when maybe you just want a cheap infrared picture with no data, just the picture, and you go to the field to learn what these colors mean. | |
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Drones
