More effective agriculture from above
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | VULTUS AB |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 242 000 |
| Project duration | April 2017 - November 2017 |
| Status | Completed |
| Venture | Innovative Startups |
Purpose and goal
Vultus nitrogen analysis can be conducted with drones, airplanes or satellite. The purpose of this project was to explore what method Vultus should deploy to gather data for the analysis. The goal was to get to a final decision as to what method to choose. The project has achieved that goal and has clarified how we should proceed.
Expected results and effects
Drones proved very difficult to scale and were riddled with technical issues. Airplanes, although efficient at collecting data over big areas, also had problems with scalability and costs. Satellites have the big advantage of being free, and the quality of the data is high enough for our use case, which is why we came to the conclusion that satellites are the best method for collecting the data. We expected to get a good understanding of the methods and a solid ground to take a decision, however, we did not expect satellites to be the best data source.
Planned approach and implementation
Initially, Vultus build an area based booking system to handle bookings from farmers and coordinate pilots. Thereafter, we had pilots conduct missions with both airplanes and drones. We processed and evaluated the data we got and compared it with each other and satellite data. Furthermore, we also evaluated scalability and costs to take a decision as to what tool is best fit to deliver Vultus analysis and help farmers maximize their fertilizer efficiency.