Agribotix Award

Agribotix Award

Agribotix Award. I'm Greg Martin with Colorado Ag Today.

A Boulder-based business has bee awarded $250-thousand dollars by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Agribotix founder and chief technology officer, Tom McKinnon talks about their drones that they use to image a field.

MCKINNON: They're fully autonomous flight. We create the mission on the ground station and it does the rest in terms of creating the mission by itself. Hit another button and it uploads that to the plane by telemetry radio and the things taking off and it's flying it's mission, comes back and lands and all the pictures are on the SD card in the camera.

The grant is to identify and advance the most innovative, viable technologies, created or manufactured in Colorado, and exported globally. McKinnon talks about one way the drones are used.

MCKINNON: The corn fields are so huge that in theory somebody could walk around and see where it needs fertilizer and where it doesn't but in practice that's totally impractical. We can fly that field in half and hour and create a map that tells the grower where the corn needs fertilizer and where it doesn't.

McKinnon says that it's estimated that the commercial drone market will exceed $1 billion annually by 2018.  The grant will substantially hasten their plans to develop their market. Significantly, it also signals validation of their technology and business model by industry experts.

And that's Colorado Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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