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A new obstacle avoidance technology will bring crop spraying and seeding operations to the next level, while reducing the effort on the part of the owner/operator.

UAVenture has partnered with SUIND to bring an advanced computer vision based obstacle avoidance system to AirRails and drone manufacturers. SUIND’s system will become a core part of the AirRails autopilot, bringing the power of computer vision technology to the crop spraying industry, allowing drones to autonomously detect and avoid obstacles during a spraying mission. In addition, it also provides centimeter-level precision independent of GPS, significantly increasing accuracy, reducing drift and providing resilience to GPS failures and glitches.

More importantly, the system has been developed and tested to be able to operate at the speeds required by typical crop spraying missions, and not at the snail pace that a lot of experimental systems run at.

Having an industry-level vision system onboard brings the operation of crop sprayers and seeding drones a number of advantages, including the detection of trees, poles and other obstacles that appear along or near the mission path, a dynamic route planning, spraying operations where manual planning around a high number of obstacles is not practical or possible, such as shade trees on tea plantations, and more, as reported by uasnews.com.