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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Drones have very short flight times and can't carry that much weight. Can this really be cheaper than driving a tractor around?

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You don't buy one big one and have it do your whole field. You buy lots of them and have them do the field as a swarm.

Consider that a row-crop tractor can cost $100-300,000 (see footnote). You can buy A LOT of little drones for that much money. Or a smaller number of drones and a number of swappable battery packs.

$300,000 worth of spraying drones could cover a huge amount of area in a lot less time, and with a lot more efficiency.

Footnote: Pricing based on 2014 article at https://www.businessinsider.com/farm-equipment-prices-2014-5

Probably more reliable to maintain, too. A single drone or even a substantial minority failing only lowers swarm throughput rather than completely taking the whole thing out of commission.

I honestly doubt it. Flight life expectancy for drones must not be great and fixing a drone can use quite a bit of time, depending on what is wrong with it.

I say that as someone who worked with drones. They are, honestly, a pain.

Do you think they'd send the inoperable drones to someone who thinks "they are a pain," or do you think they'd send the drones to a vendor who is experienced with their specific model and can quickly address any issues they find?

Have you worked with large numbers? I feel like industrial scale drone swarms would be much different than the consumer ones we're used to. Even military ones that are individually very valuable.

Possibly. You might be right. But the experiences I had with them are less then stellar. They are fickle, break easily, are more work than you'd think to maintain and have not so great flight time. I might have a tainted experience and maybe just one data point, maybe many thing changed in the last 3 years. But my experience with them is this.

I kept looking at the many consumer drone startups that kept popping up and promising various abilities, but they were, almost all of them, lacking. Videography and photogrammetry are the few fields where they took off, and that is because there you have a trained individual controlling the drone. I find it hard to find any startups or products where drones with high autonomy are being successful.

Am open to being proved wrong though, I'm always excited to see development in this field.

For commercial applications like this, I'd assume the eventual setup would be to have drones follow pre-programmed routes linked to specific day/time flight schedules, then have them automatically return to a re-charging/re-filling station as needed. The time & labor savings alone would be astronomical. Tie a system like this in with solar energy, could also dramatically reduce energy costs and carbon footprint.

The article mentions controlled dosage and the fact the worms eat at night so perhaps having a human on a tractor chasing worms by night is not the best solution either.

The challenge is getting the tractors into the right locations and keeping their operators out of the spray. It would be harder to get precise application so they are more likely to use more and higher concentrations of pesticide.

The most cost-effective response using traditional application of pesticides is probably bigger drones (aka a flying tractor)

Look up Blue River Technology. Proof of concept for this tech already exists, John Deere will have this tech out in the coming years.

Remote-control tractor seems simple enough.

We pretty much already have remote control tractors via autosteer. The operator is a meat weight making sure nothing catches on fire.

Autosteer, of course, is only useful off of public roads, what with all the pesky pedestrians and other vehicles.

They can still fly long enough on a set of batteries to spray a reasonably-sized field. They can be much more precise than spraying from a plane and are much cheaper.

They have a real use-case though of course they are not always the best option.

Looks like you got some downvotes for not showing a relentless enthusiasm for using the latest tech to solve every problem.

Perhaps most of the product is a refueling station.

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