Customer:

Lettuce growers in Queensland and Tasmania

Problem:

When harvesting lettuce products, farmers must ensure that mice and other small animals are not caught up in the harvesting equipment. V-TOL Aerospace was contacted to provide advanced non intrusive detection services.

How we did it:

Hardware

V-TOL Aerospace used a variety of hardware in the broad acre pest detection task. The V-TOL Seeker multi rotor aircraft provided a small, low noise, low profile, long endurance aerial platform to maximise the survey and detection capability. Supplying 45 minute flight time, as well as night operations compliance and autonomous terrain following capability, the Seeker aircraft is a perfect fit for broad acre pest detection.

The Seeker aircraft is complemented with the latest cutting edge thermal and/or optical payloads. Radiometric, high frame rate, thermal cameras are essential for night time pest detection, and can be combined with high resolution optical cameras, or dual optical/thermal sensors to provide the ultimate surveillance tool.

“The Seeker aircraft’s long endurance, BVLOS, night operations, terrain following, autonomous capability combines with V-TOLs autonomous image targeting and identifying VEURON software enables stand alone operations with actionable results”

Software

Along with the latest aerial hardware, cutting edge detection software is implemented onboard V-TOLs aircraft. VEURON, V-TOLs real-time, onboard image detection and targeting software is deployed on miniaturized computers to locate pests such as mice on the fly, providing pest counts and locations as soon as the aircraft lands. Using these positional and numerical results, the farmer is then able to determine what actions are needed to mitigate pest ingestion risks.