Digital Platform for Unmanned Air Traffic "The firmament", developed by a resident of the Skolkovo Foundation, will help agricultural drones work. The transition to "smart" farming is already underway in the Yaroslavl region, the Skolkovo press service reports.
Monitoring of agricultural land using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) allows farmers to control water supply, sowing crops, soil diversity and the spread of harmful plants. Drones take pictures in the infrared and visual spectral range, which makes it possible to assess the condition of plants. Technologies of the Nebosvod platform allow you to see what is impossible to track with the naked eye. The platform developer is the Aeroscript company, which brings together engineers and IT specialists to organize safe unmanned air traffic.
Ivan Kosenkov, Senior Project Manager of the Advanced Manufacturing Technologies Cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation: “Drones find themselves in many areas of activity, including precision farming. However, in order to use new tools effectively, an infrastructure is needed to ensure safe, operational, systematic work on obtaining data from drones. The Skolkovo resident Aeroscript, among other things, also solves the problem of organizing unmanned air traffic in terms of coordinating flights.”
The digital platform not only automates flight coordination, but also provides a number of specialized user-friendly tools. In particular, the ability to use KML/KMZ files to load flight task parameters into the system and to display GIS layers with user fields. The map showing the structure of the airspace has a number of elements that make the coordination more accurate and convenient. All this greatly facilitates the work of farmers.
Sergey Shchukin, Head of the Department of Agronomy of the Yaroslavl State Agricultural Academy, Candidate of Sciences: “An important feature of such monitoring is the absence of direct contact with the ground, which means a decrease in soil compaction, an increase in the effective area of crops and an increase in yield by 3-10%. The realities of today require the modernization of the agricultural sector and the transition to the so-called smart farming, where modern technologies for monitoring and decision-making based on artificial intelligence will be actively used. And it is already clear that the task will be solved with the help of robots and drones.”