[AShyFig]

Drones are going to be a large part of agriculture, but the problem isn't the technology. Imo the technology is already at a point where it's useful enough for me to invest in. If i wanted to today i could buy what i need for scouting and spraying a ~1000h farm from aliexpress.

The problem is the regulatory environment on two fronts. First ( in Canada) the pesticides I'd like to use are not registered for drone application, even if they are registered for application from helicopter or plane.

Second, I don't have priority airspace rights. Which means I have to have a person watching both the drone and surrounding airspace for crop dusters or personal low flying aircraft. Even if I file a flight plan weeks ahead of time and a NOTAM [notice to all airmen] i am required to ground my drone if an aircraft with a person is nearby. Even if they have failed to file NOTAMs, which in the case of my local spray dudes is 100% of the time. This makes completing a scouting or spraying job more labour intensive than using a tractor because I often require a spotter at the far end of a field.

Until the regulatory issues are sorted out, and drones can be operated with Beyond Visual Line of Sight rules, you won't see massa adoption of this tech.

My drone fleet is sitting and collecting dust at the moment, which is a shame because they do provide valuable information.

[matthewdgreen]

In the US, at least, regulatory solutions happen when large commercial interests get behind them. Commercial agribusiness is extremely powerful, so the lack of regulatory clarity will presumably disappear the second that large businesses decide they need to deploy this tech.

[sverhagen]

Verizon owned a drone startup, they even participated in congressional hearings related to drones, yet they still couldn't extract bvlos waivers from the FAA for testing. How much bigger and influencial should a party be?

[beeeeerp]

As a pilot, this has always been weird to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that people just don’t like drones. I think selling them to the masses is part of the answer.

I can build a tower (with exemptions for protected airspace) that’s 199ft in the US without any problem. To me, that basically says to any pilot “expect the unexpected if you fly lower than that,” which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.

[defrost]

> 199ft in the US .. which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.

Not to geophysical exploration pilots running gravity, radiometrics, magnetics, etc in modified crop dusters at 80m ground clearance and 70m/s.

199 ft ~= 60m which a survey line might bottom out at when draping over ridges, etc.

Literally millions and millions of line kilometres are flown at those specifications, entire countries (like Mali, Fiji, Australia, etc) have been covered at 200m line separation.

Insanely low for yourself is pretty much just another day in the cockpit in just another month long survey job for survey pilots.

Not to mention actual crop dusting and other STOL grunt work.

[beeeeerp]

Those pilots are in the minority, and already accept a much higher level of risk. Also, drone flights that have been problematic are typically in congested areas (much like laser problems).

What might have been better is if the FAA had created a way for those pilots to create mini low-level TFRs or protected airspace to warn drone pilots not to fly their during inspections. It’s also worth mentioning that many survey jobs are being replaced by more advanced drones due to cost.

I do respect what you are saying, but having a foot on both sides of the fence can’t help but feel like the FAA had a knee-jerk reaction to drones.

If I fly a 600g drone below treetop level in a heavily forested, rural area, it will have 0 impact to aviation. This is currently illegal without licensing, additional hardware, or a flight notification. I find this silly.

[defrost]

> Those pilots are in the minority

Their racked up line kilometres aren't though.

In the light aircraft domain working survey and dusting aircraft ideally work all the daylight hours with pilots on shift to take over as daily flight hours pass personal limits.

The economics are such that the planes are always aloft, parked at night, or being maintained.

Air Transport companies price light passenger and mail runs on the basis of daily, perhaps twice daily A->B runs, Air Tractor companies price on the basis of 100,000 line kilometres jobs completed as rapidly as possible in order to move onto the next, there's a backlog of mineral exploration and agriculture work demanding more craft and pilots.

> and already accept a much higher level of risk.

I'm sorry, are you saying that makes it OK to add more risk to low level drafting by just allowing any old drone up in the air anywhere at all?

Until some form of comprehensive regulation is resolved and upheld with drone operators required to get clearance for airspaces it's still better to err on the side of human safety now.

[8note]

It's pretty safe flying that low, more like driving a car than flying a plane, because the danger is the forward movement and not the falling

[beeeeerp]

I’m going to disagree unless you are in a specific area of aviation, because it severely reduces your emergency landing options.

[defrost]

Depends on the operator, K.Geophysics operated for 25+ years with 15+ airframes (mostly fixed wing, some heli's) with zero deaths or crashes.

Another company bought them out and had three major crashes and five deaths with the next two years.

You can put that down to quality of maintainance and route planning.

One crash due to engine failure on takeoff and climbing, a second due to tangling with power lines that were not on the flight plan, the third I'm unsure but IIRC it was maintainance again.

By cause these were crashes caused by poor support surrounding the work rather than intrinsic risk of low flying .. of which only the power line tangle had an element of, which wouldn't have happened had the support team down their homework.

[defrost]

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40466255

[GenerocUsername]

I bet agriculture drones rarely need to fly more than 50 feet up. They probably spend the majority of their time around 5m. I doubt air traffic would be a big concern outside legal restrictions that might not be fine grained enough to know the difference

[dogcomplex]

You're very knowledgeable, this is great. Is there any automated tech on the market you've seen to do the spotting for you, so you can dynamically ground drones as air conditions change? Also, are you piloting all these manually (yknow, if they weren't gathering dust), is it a preset flight plan, or are you already experimenting with AI control? Would think even an LLM fed with air traffic sensor data could make the call to ground drones and switch between flight plans dynamically at this point - though I'd want it thoroughly tested and airing on the side of caution always. Also - what kind of height do you require for drone dusting? Could you get away with keeping it low to the ground, dusting only a few plants at a time at the expense of longer flight time and battery charging, but at least hopefully practically low enough to skirt any potential collision and legal issues, and potentially still entirely automated? Would think that kind of specificity also allows for stuff like dusting individual crop areas differently according to need, too.

All just thoughts from a programmer here - very cool you get to experiment with this kind of stuff in a practical setting. Hope it gets more practical soon!

Bummer the law is so slow on this.

[AShyFig]

Automated spotting is a bit of a bandaid, but might prove more useful as this situation drags on. I've thought about those raspberry pi flight trackers, but I don't think you can get the data I'm looking for from from Mode C Transponders, which is what I assume the small guys use. I haven't looked into it too deeply. The optics needed for a visual system are daunting, (the area I need to watch is large, and planes are small and fast!) but might be possible. A radar solution might be possible as well. Based on my understanding of the technology I don't think this is the right application for an LLM, but perhaps more traditional algorithm coupled with a modification of the right-of-way rules would do the trick.

The drones I fly for scouting are on various premade flight plans. DroneDeploy.com offers a good application for mapping fields from 300' high, and FlyLitchi.com works well for custom paths (flying to one spot in the field, dropping down low to take a high resolution picture of the crop, then zipping back up and repeating several times.) I can't see much benefit to full AI control of the aircraft. The current mode of operation has them on preset "rails" with room for adapting to obstacles using ultrasonic sensors. I'd like some visual adaption capabilities, perhaps something to do with lidar and SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping), but my drones don't have these sensors, and the last time I looked into this a DIY solution was out of my wheelhouse.

I've only seen water trials of spray drones, but my understanding is the lower the better, within reason. depending on the vortices the aircraft generates the spray booms need to be about 4-6' off the canopy top, so ~15' total flight height. You can find a little bit of an overview here: https://sprayers101.com/drone-sprayers-are-we-ready/

[dogcomplex]

Fascinating. Thank you for answering that all - I will definitely be looking back at this post one day if and when I get to play with this stuff myself. Appreciate the site links especially

Sounds like a lot of legal overhead is mainly what's standing between drone spraying... 30-60 day delay between plan submission and operation, not easy to keep that practical. Though at least yeah - 15' seems like a much more manageable height - hopefully that would at least be underneath any neighboring aircraft

Fair on the LLM - always use traditional algorithms if available and with effort/time for such things. LLMs are just the convenient duct tape / superglue to throw at handling edge cases with some confidence they'll generally use common sense about it. Untrained intern equivalent which can be combined with the algorithms if they're brittle.

[0xfae]

If the local spray pilots aren't filing their paperwork and presumably not getting in trouble, isn't it reasonable that no one would care if you did the same?

It sounds like no one is enforcing those rules/laws.

[dghlsakjg]

NOTAMs are largely optional especially for things like making cropdusting passes in uncontrolled areas.

In this context the local pilots aren't out of compliance with any rules. The regulatory issue is that for almost all purposes human piloted craft have priority over remotely piloted craft, and there isn't a good way, currently, to communicate with pilots in the area.

Believe it or not, there are parts of the US, rural areas especially, where it is perfectly legal to fly an airplane without a radio or any other electronics.

[ClumsyPilot]

That’s really crazy

[dghlsakjg]

Not really.

All of these ag planes are operating under VFR, they can see each-other, largely they don't need to talk to each other, and don't need to know what exactly every plane in the vicinity is doing. It doesn't seem like it should work, but midair collisions between planes just aren't very common.

For planes, not filing an optional NOTAM for routine work is about as risky as not getting a police escort vehicle to go buy groceries. If we start allowing RC/autonomous cars on the roadway that place other drivers at risk, we might start wanting to file our grocery buying plans so we don't die. Or we would just say that you can't drive your RC car on the road when other road users are present.

[AShyFig]

They have the natural right of way. No matter who's paperwork isn't filled out, if a spray plane hits my drone I am at fault.

[dheera]

In 2010 I biked through a lot of Japanese countryside and saw quite a few drones (of the helicopter variety) spraying crops. They seemed human-controlled, but still, way ahead of their time.

[ivankolev]

I would think some sort of mesh beacon network on all flying things to enable auto-avoidance protocols, would be a logical technology solution?

[AShyFig]

The future of drones, especially in dense areas may require some sort of technological solution like that, but for the time being out in the boonies here I would love for the rules to change so that the first 300' or so of airspace above my property is "claimed."

Enter at your own risk.

[nradov]

How is that going to work with civil VFR aircraft, including helicopters? ADS-B Out still isn't even required in some classes of airspace. The notion of retrofitting every old R-22 with TCAS is ludicrous.

[ivankolev]

Was just thinking out loud, as a layman, along the lines of how not to wait for top down regulation, but still going around the practical problem of avoiding in both senses, the actual collision and the authorities eyes on you :) I don't even know the acronyms you gave, going on a rabbit hunt now

[creer]

This might be ripe for self-piloting drones. Let the human crop dusters fly in daylight. While the farmer programs the night mission. And the automatic drones take over at night.

[sverhagen]

Are the rules different at night? Besides being even more strict? I think not.

[creer]

Interesting. Some crop dusters indeed fly at night. And no, there are no special rules in the US - at least not for the human pilot.

Except presumably both the drone and the human aircraft would have lights which might make it easier for them to avoid each other.