Technology

Drones may soon do some of the donkey work on Irish farms

ZenaDrone uses machine learning to monitor farmland and is working with pilot customers here

ZenaDrone has created a drone that can be customised for use on farms or in other industries

Ciara O'Brien's face
Ciara O'Brien
Thu Jun 9 2022 - 05:00

If Dr Shaun Passley’s vision comes to pass, Irish agriculture is in for an overhaul. Using a fleet of intelligent drones armed with everything from cameras to sprayers, Irish farmers may soon be able to hand over some of the more labour-intensive monitoring of their farmland to algorithms and artificial intelligence.

ZenaDrone has already working with a number of pilot customers in Ireland as it seeks to refine its offering and target new industries.

US-based ZenaDrone started life in 2017 as ZenaPay, which was targeted at the US’s cannabis industry. At the time, laws in the US had been changed to allow cannabis to be legalised at a state level, but not at a federal level, Dr Passley explains. Because of this anomaly, banks would not allow companies to have the money lodged to their accounts. ZenaPay used bitcoin wallet to allow cannabis companies to access their money. The company later expanded in Canada, and from there, the payments side of things was spun off. Instead, it began to concentrate on plant traceability, using drones as the main instrument.

The first visit to Ireland came in 2019, when the company arrived here with a third-party drone, its software and a plan to train the drone how to deal with terrain that was far different from the flat farmlands near Chicago.

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There were lessons learned. The drone had only a 25-minute flight time, which meant the batteries had to be manually changed if there wasn’t sufficient time to recharge the battery between flights, grab the flash drives and load it up to the computer.

“There was a tremendous amount of labour-intensive activities,” Dr Passley said. “They only did a couple of scans a month, so very short, and therefore it wasn’t very useful.”

The best option, they decided, was to create its own drone, one that would allow for a one-hour flight time, automatically; and of a charging pad that would scan the area and have other functionalities, too.

“To get to that level, the drone started getting larger, and as they got larger, we were able to more capabilities into the drone,” said Dr Passley. That meant sprayers and weed-killer, for example.

Artificial intelligence

The end result of its development efforts is the ZenaDrone 1000, an intelligent, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that uses machine-learning software and artificial intelligence.

“Once the drone has scanned the field, the information is sent to our experts. They will input the information to our machine-learning process. So the next time the machine-learning software will then provide the report automatically to the farmer. So every time there’s anything new, a human being looks at the information first, identifies what the information is and then the machine learning does next time.”

Cloud services play a part in processing the data and making it available to the farmer in rapid time.

There are positives to using the drones to monitor agricultural land. More information means farmers can make better decisions on their crops and where to plant them. Because the drone can more precisely identify diseased areas of a crop, you need only spray the affected areas rather than an entire field. Less pesticide use means lower costs and better outcomes for the environment.

“The drone takes off from a charging pad, goes to the farm field, scans a field, and with artificial intelligence and machine learning determines the particular areas in the farm that need to be treated. It goes back and grabs the sprayer automatically and treats only those areas. It doesn’t treat the whole farmland or the whole field,” Dr Passley said.

“We can do scans from seed level, before we even plant the seeds. You are scanning the field so you are able to remove any issues ahead of time. There could be some moisture issues that cause irrigation problems; all that can be removed before you plant the seeds.”

Last year ZenaDrone crossed the Atlantic again and officially set up shop in Ireland, with the goal of making Ireland’s fields healthier and more productive. “The reason why we choose Ireland as the premier location for ZenaDrone is due to agricultural concentration,” Dr Passley explains. Now it is planning to create 30 jobs in the country, hoping to bring new services to industries ranging from agriculture and property management to construction and power. It currently has around five employees.

“Hiring our first employees was not that difficult,” he said. “We found a good pool of talent immediately.” That was helped by the presence of multinationals such as Google, Apple and Facebook, which have been training up employees and generally increasing the skill level of tech staff in Ireland.

Big plans

The company has big plans, targeting up to 60 customers by the end of the year. By the end of the May the company was hoping to have up to six drones here; the official launch comes only a few days after that deadline. By the end of the year, it is looking at 25 drones located in Ireland.

Passley said he believes the company has much further to grow in Ireland. “I believe yes, we can grow up further. The response has been good so far,” he said.

Work is already under way on meeting those goals. The company appointed a business development manager, Simon Henry, who is hard at work meeting potential clients in the furthest reaches of the island.

When you talk about using smart technology in remote areas though, the first question that usually comes up is about the provision – or lack thereof – of high speed internet services.

A decent broadband signal isn’t necessary for the drone though, Dr Passley explains.

The system communicates in a number of different ways. Radio frequencies, for example, which he says can be used over distances of up to 10km, and mobile internet at 4G or 5G networks. Plus the introduction of Space X’s Starlink internet service to Ireland opens up new possibilities for the underserved areas of the country.

If the industry goes the way Passley thinks, the usage of drones is set to soar in the coming years.

It’s not just a potential game changer for farmers, though. The company is also looking at the possibility of using the drones to monitor renewable energy equipment on wind farms.

Cracks in turbines

Sending a drone up to a windmill is faster and probably less risky to the equipment and the staff involved, and could help spot potential problems such as cracks in the turbines before they become a serious issue.

Construction companies have also shown an interest in the technology, and ZenaDrone has also been in talks with a powerline company. In that case, the drones would replace costly inspections carried out via helicopter, making it not only more efficient but also cheaper. The drones could also be used for emergency responses, such as fire fighting.

The future of drones seems an exciting one. Control in the future could lie more with smart glasses and advanced robotics, with ZenaDrone making some acquisitions in this area in preparation.

The idea of drones-as-a-service could also make the technology more accessible to smaller farmers, for whom buying a drone would be out of their reach. Passley said this model would see the drones paid for with a monthly subscription fee, guaranteeing them access to the drone but shared among other service users.

“I do think for smaller farmers, it makes a lot of sense because if you only have about 20 or 30 acres, our drones start at around €50,000 and depending on customisation it goes higher than that. I do think if you’re a farmer having a small monthly fee to get the daily scan of your field may be a better option.”