Скачать или смотреть Agriculture Drone Dials In Nutrients as Needed

Drones are making agriculture more exciting by improving efficiency and saving resources. For example, take this invention, a brain child of the brilliant Dr. Soon-Shiong of NantWorks.

You are a farmer. Your crops are doing well, but you have some underperforming regions where the crops are smaller or sick. You do soil measurements, and discover that the region needs aragonite, mixed with some fertilizer. Send in the drones.

This invention allows a drone with two containers to dial in the amount of the soil additives a specific plant needs. Adding nutrients in such a pin-pointed way will assure that only the sick plant will get the help it needs, and no extra additive is wasted on a spray operation.

What is aragonite? The patent says it “may beneficially provide calcium to support pH buffering while also providing trace nutrients and live bacteria, all without increasing the amount of magnesium in the soil as may occur when limestone is used. It is possible to adaptively add aragonite to soil in differing amounts as needed for arbitrarily small regions of a field by analyzing current conditions (once per day). This property makes it especially important for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness that the quantity of aragonite be finetuned in real time based on the current conditions of the field. Moreover, since the ideal amounts of other additives such as fertilizer may depend on the amount of aragonite that is added, while the amount of aragonite and other additives may in turn depend on the quantity of seeds planted or dropped in a given area, it is important to derive relative amounts of multiple payloads to be delivered in combination based on real time conditions.”

Needless to say, the drone is controlled by sophisticated guidance systems such as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and other methods.

Title: “Drone-based Payload Management”
US Patent No: 12221214
Filed (US Reg.): 2023-09-12
Granted: 2025-02-11
Assignee: Nant Holdings IP, LLC

www.uavpatents.com/agriculture-drone-dials-in-nutrients-as-needed/