Autonomous Crop Dusters
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Reducing labor costs is an obvious perk to autonomous innovation, but what about the other benefits? Michael Norcia, CEO of Pyka, a self-sufficient aircraft company rooted in agricultural spraying says the technology they’ve developed comes with several robust value propositions, with labor actually being the most minute of them all.
Norcia… “We can fly at night. A lot of the viable spray window in Latin America and really most of the world is maybe three hours in the morning and maybe one hour in the evening, so being able to fly at night can double the spray window per day; it can conceivably triple it. We’ve done a lot to try and mitigate the risk of off-target chemical drift. So, the aircraft has a dynamic wind model that runs on the vehicle and it updates 100 times per second. We’re able to use that wind model to stop spraying when the conditions aren’t suitable. We also want to try and do stuff relating to inversions and automatically detect those in order to stop spraying if there’s any semblance of an inversion. The plane’s really quiet. The whole spraying activity can be a lot less in your face, and that’s definitely relevant for a grower who has to spray once per week year-round. Obviously, there’s no human being in the aircraft. We really see that as like a powerful value proposition for customers who fly a lot of aircraft. Cost is the last one, so just comparing the per acre sprayed vehicle associated cost with our technology versus an air tractor. We could make it dramatically less expensive.”
That’s Michael Norcia of Pyka.
