LleidaDrone will present, within the Area 5G de Ponent, the innovative project Crop Doc, an Artificial Intelligence application to detect fire blight in apple trees.
The largest drone for agricultural use, the DJI T6 Agras, will be one of the attractions of the next edition of Sant Miquel and Eurofruit. Among the various activities that the show will offer in the field of drones, there will be flying exhibitions of around fifty devices, including the DJI T6 Agras, a 252 × 221.2 × 72 cm drone (with arms and propellers deployed) designed to work efficiently in any conditions and terrain. This drone will come from LleidaDrone and the Lleida-based company specialising in these machines, Aerofor. Another of the novelties to be presented by LleidaDrone is the Crop Doc Terminal project, an advanced Artificial Intelligence application designed for Smart Agro.
The DJI T6 Agras is a dust and waterproof drone with a detection system capable of dodging obstacles that allows it to spray even on trees planted on steep slopes. It has a large payload capacity (it incorporates a 16-litre tank that sprays up to 6.5 metres wide). It is capable of spraying 10 hectares in one hour, 67% more than the previous model. Despite its large dimensions, its new modular design allows it to reduce its volume by up to 75% to facilitate transport. The body of the aircraft is made of carbon fibre, which makes it lighter and stronger. The remote control range is up to 3 km.
LleidaDrone will also be present at the 5G Area Ponent with the presentation, on Saturday at 11.15 am, of the Crop Doc Terminal project, an Artificial Intelligence application designed for Smart Agro, developed by the ICT Laboratories of the Lleida Science Park in collaboration with LleidaDrone. It is a system for detecting fire blight in apple trees (in the future the system will be developed to recognise other plant pests in different types of fruit trees). The application implements two hardware systems, a Google Coral TPU and an Nvidia Sonamu Jet, which allow the disease to be identified by taking a photograph of the affected tree and comparing it with more than 25,000 images of the plant in different states (diseased or not), which the device has in memory.
The device accelerates processing speed 100 times faster than a mobile phone and also has 5G communications to be able to transmit hundreds of photographs downloaded from the cloud at very high speed, although it can also operate in offline mode, to be able to work in areas with no connectivity. In the future, it is envisaged that a “federated” model will work, where different farmers using the device can automatically share their model in the cloud, so that they can all benefit from each other’s experience. If a farmer discovers an error in the detection of the disease by the device, he can correct it himself, and in this way the experience of this user will be useful for other farmers. This project has been a finalist in the 5G Challenge of the national operator Orange.
In addition to the flight of the DJI T6 Agras, LleidaDrone Arena, LleidaDrone’s indoor flight network, which will be located in Pavilion 4, will host tests and exhibitions of around fifty drones controlled by different pilots and collaborators of the organisation.
On Saturday from 12.00 LleidaDrone will also take part in the Lleida Orchard Day at the stand of the Paeria, in this case with the presentation of the Labrador Simulator project. On the other hand, the entity will exhibit videos with the latest advances related to the Dronecoria project and will make available to the public 4 computers for young people and children to play the content creation and dissemination project of the Huerta de Lleida “Simulador de labrador” (Farmer Simulator).
Finally, in the Corner space of Ponent Aerospace, the spinoff of LleidaDrone P.E.R.A. will be present with different contents and projects, such as those related to the Google scholarship students who this summer have made space visualisations on the Liquid Galaxy platform.
The LleidaDrone Association was founded in 2011 in the Science and Technology Park of Lleida and has developed more than 70 events in Lleida, in the rest of Spain and in several European countries, always with the philosophy of offering activities to disseminate projects and drone technology without profit.
