ZenaDrone, a subsidiary of the AI and drone services company ZenaTech, is building and testing a mobile agricultural drone operations trailer at its facility in Mesa, Arizona, designed to carry drones to a farm and handle much of the routine work of keeping them flying.
The trailer is configured for ZenaDrone's IQ Octo, a medium-sized, eight-motor, battery-powered autonomous drone that can spray, seed and spread, carrying up to 25 kilograms of liquid or seed along programmed flight paths. Drones launch and land through a retractable top cover and adjustable panels, and the trailer is meant to recharge batteries, refill payloads and deploy and recover the drones automatically. It is designed to manage up to five drones working the same job as a swarm.
"Our customers want more acres covered, jobs completed faster, and lower service costs," said ZenaTech's chief executive. He said the work starts in precision agriculture, with the aim of extending it across the company's Drone as a Service business, in which farmers hire drone work instead of buying their own fleets.
The company expects the trailer to cut downtime from manual battery swaps and refilling, so more acres can be covered in a day. Later uses could include land surveying, infrastructure inspection and construction.
The trailer is still a prototype, and testing will continue over the coming months.
Photo: USDA Forest Service / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: Farms.com
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