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Could the newest farmhand be a drone?
Research in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is bringing drone technology to agriculture, one of the major industries with excellent potential for growth. Specifically, drone technology is being tested with sheep at Virginia Tech.
"We are looking at ways drones can be used on small farms," said Dan Swafford, project associate for Virginia Cooperative Extension. "Farms could use drones as a 'check-on' tool to ensure that sheep are where they are supposed to be."
Drones can help farmers gain quick access to see if an animal is in need or injured, to examine if a ewe has delivered a new lamb, or more generally to check the status of the farm.
Agriculture is one of the industries where drones will make a big impact in the coming years. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the potential market for agricultural drones is $32.4 billion because high-tech systems with the ability to monitor crops or livestock can reduce human errors and save time and money.
Do drones make more sense than static cameras with CCTV?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:29PM
Concur, and you can't really get good detail with PTZ, even in an open field, on more than a few acres. Try to get decent fixed coverage on a ranch of 1000 acres, especially with less than perfectly flat and clear terrain, and fixed cameras would not only be ridiculously expensive to install, but also ridiculously expensive to maintain.
A single drone is a kind of extreme PTZ cam. It can fly high (up to 400', legally) for the wide shot, identify areas of interest, and zoom in as close as needed. With ~25 minutes flight time and 30mph cruise, that's an effective operational radius of over 5 miles, or coverage of > 50,000 acres from a single launch point, and that launch point can be on the back of a pickup truck.
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