Delair Announces UX11 Ag Drone for Agriculture & Forestry

Delair, a France-based supplier of commercial drone solutions, has announced a new drone platform specifically optimized for the agriculture industry. Aimed at enabling a new level of decision agriculture and built on the foundation of the successful Delair UX11 fixed-wing UAV, this new version, the Delair UX11 Ag combines the productivity benefits of long-range/BVLOS flight operations along with highly accurate survey-grade mapping and plant data collection capabilities – all in an easy-to-use platform.

Delair UX11 Ag

The UX11 Ag’s features include:

• An enhanced centimetre-level geolocation and its efficient operational characteristics make it the most cost-effective solution for large area farming and forestry. This supports a productivity-oriented workflow for long-range, multi-field and multi-flight operations and enables a perfect overlay of maps for temporal analysis or machine guidance.
• Equipped with sensing technologies and a fully integrated Micasense multispectral camera to generate plant health indexes and RGB images which can be calibrated for precise, repeatable measurements for plant-level measuring, including bird level, biomass and chlorophyll allowing real time review of data and providing even more efficiency for analyzing field data real time.
• Owing to its long-range capabilities, the Delair UAV can typically cover up to 900 hectares in a single day with only six flights at 150-meter altitude thereby saving the amount of time and money required to provide detailed surveys of large-scale agriculture operations
• Being easy and fast in setting up and deployment, and with a rugged “ag-proof” design specifically built to withstand harsh operational challenges in agriculture sector, its overall maintenance is minimal and results in a quick payback for users.
• It is easy-to-assemble and easy-to-carry system, weighing just 1.4 kg and can be hand launched. The UAV features BTOL for steep-climb take offs and descents in confined areas, reducing down time between flights and extending its use to challenging environments such as dense vegetation in plantations or forests.
• Two communications options available with the drone are: the Delair Link for 2.4 GHz wireless communications, allowing a range of up to 5 km, and an integrated secure cellular connection on partner 3G and 4G networks, reducing potential interference issues and allowing a longer range, including BVLOS operations.

“The Delair UX11-Ag directly addresses an opportunity in the fast-growing agriculture and forestry segment with a solution that uniquely meets the productivity and ease-of-use requirements of these operations. It fills the void that exists between traditional small-scale solutions such as flight-time-limited quadcopters, and the limited resolution and agility through satellites,” said Michaël de Lagarde, co-founder and CEO of Delair. “We have built a platform that is both cost effective and high performing to deliver very precise and actionable insights for agricultural stakeholders of all kinds of crops.”

Overall the UX11 Ag seems best suited for a range of large-scale agriculture activities like inventory control to optimize operations management and crop planning, increased traceability for sustainability, health monitoring of crops and extraction of key production metrics, and crop response assessment in field trials and research.