Ag retailer Heinen Brothers Agra Services—best-known for manned crop spraying airplanes—is pushing into the unmanned house by way of a brand new subsidiary known as Kelly Hills Unmanned Systems, pitched as “essentially the most superior aerial and ground-based agricultural robotics enablement platform on the planet.”
To mark its launch, Kelly Hills is holding an ag UAS (unmanned aircraft system) testing event in Kansas next week (Aug 22) which is able to characteristic Pyka’s ‘Pelican Spray,’ billed as the most important commercially accessible UAS within the US.
Kelly Hills is the primary US buyer for Pelican Spray, the most important UAS approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for industrial use, mentioned Heinen Bros CTO Lukas Koch, the brand new CEO at Kelly Hills.
“As specialists in aerial utility, we see the potential for UAS to revolutionize our business, providing vital cost-saving advantages to American farmers. Pelican Spray is the primary autonomous agricultural resolution that delivers the required work charge and spray efficiency wanted to offer a viable industrial resolution to start augmenting our present fleet.
“Finally, we need to maintain the pilots of our manned plane safer, so we’re adopting a proactive strategy that can permit UAS to deal with sure workloads that can get our conventional pilots residence safely to their households and family members.”
Pelican Spray will conduct a reside flight demonstration in Seneca, Kansas, on August 22 as a part of the Kelly Hills launch occasion, which is open to prospects, distributors, researchers, coverage makers, and agriculture business leaders.
49,000 sq. mile drone testing vary spanning 4 states
By means of a relationship with the College of Alaska-Fairbanks, the FAA has permitted 49,000 sq. mile unmanned aerial programs check vary spanning Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa, permitting for superior drone testing on programs that aren’t available to public customers, mentioned Koch.
“Unmanned aerial utility in agriculture is accelerating sooner in different nations than it’s right here in the USA. We invite American agriculture and worldwide gamers to Kansas on August 22 for a possibility to look over the horizon, glimpse into the longer term and be taught extra about climate-friendly precision agriculture and economically possible agricultural unmanned aerial programs.”
The vary gives the power to host fixed-wing, multirotor, and rotary-wing programs testing functions on ten totally different crops together with corn, soybeans and milo, he defined: “This privately managed check vary will present a novel alternative for builders and producers to judge system efficacy in a low-risk setting whereas serving to merchandise attain commercialization sooner by means of collaboration with key events within the worth chain.
“Our objective is to change into the epicenter for unmanned aerial programs within the agricultural house. We search relationships with those that need to capitalize on these property and make the most of a one-of-a-kind check vary to maneuver the agricultural business ahead.”
‘It’s arduous to seek out pilots’
Koch advised AgFunderNews: “We’re began in 1994 with two brothers and one airplane in northeast Kansas; right now we cowl states from Illinois to Louisiana. Alongside the best way, we acquired into ag retail, promoting inputs and fertilizers and a few floor rig functions.
“The [manned] aerial utility business has been on a gentle upward development for over 100 years, however spray drones have quite a lot of potential, so we now have been taking a look at the way to work these into our industrial operation.”
He added: “We’ve been participating with corporations and OEMs of those spray drones and went out to seek out greater, higher, sooner programs, to see who is de facto pushing the envelope. We discovered a number of corporations, and as we began to speak with them, we discovered extra about their ache factors, but in addition noticed an enormous void. I noticed quite a lot of air taxi work, bundle supply work, air medical work, however fewer huge agricultural particular platforms.
“So I used to be speaking to a few of these corporations and mentioned, apart from us being an early adopter and attempting to work with you in your early prototypes and get these items prepared to your prospects, how about we dive deeper and work with the FAA to assist transfer this alongside? And so we had good conversations with the FAA and had been very lucky to seek out our associate, the College of Fairbanks, Alaska, to get this check vary arrange.
“Now we will work with these drone corporations and OEMs, to start out actually testing the programs in actual world environments.”
He added: “An enormous a part of why we we’re doing that is pilot security. It’s arduous to seek out pilots. Northeast Kansas is kind of hilly, we now have quite a lot of timber and smaller fields and the airplanes are always having to enter fairly harmful conditions with energy traces and timber and different obstacles. In these circumstances, it’s simply higher to make use of unmanned programs.”
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发布者：Elaine Watson，转转请注明出处：https://robotalks.cn/kelly-hills-unmanned-systems-debuts-with-the-largest-commercial-autonomous-crop-sprayer-in-the-us-5/
