Well, this week we’re going to highlight one of the coolest products that I found at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, Calif., we’re going to toss it off to the booth at Pyka where they’re going to be showing off their new product, the Pelican 2. It is an herbicide and fungicide sprayer plane. Take a look at some of the specs.
“What you’re looking at here is an entirely autonomous, fully electric crop duster, essentially. So it runs on 4, 25-kilowatt electric motors, and those are powered by 3 battery packs which live in the nose over here. These are mock ups right here, just sand bags, but these are about the size of our battery packs so 3 of them would fit in the nose there. And that supplies power. The payload capacity of the drone is about 80 gallons, you can see that on our tank right here. These are the fill lines, so we hold about 80 gallons.
“The aircraft, like I said, runs on a battery set with 3 batteries on it and in order for you to stay continuously operating with the aircraft, we provide the system with 4 different battery sets. Each battery set takes about an hour to charge and you generally get about 25-45 minutes of flight time out of each set. So by the time you discharge the one on the plane, you’ve got a full set ready to go here. And they are hot swappable so you just pull these out and slap one in the plane. And the idea is that it takes about the same amount of time to fill your plane to 80 gallons as it does to swap out a battery.
“Basically all your mission planning happens here on this laptop. You can see a representative area here. So if you zoom in, let’s say this is what you want to spray. You just draw in the polygon whatever you want. So you kind of just draw these vertices and let’s say you want to spray this area roughly and you just upload this mission and it will plan a path for you. So this is the path that the plane will now fly. And then we have this 3D visualizer over here on the right, that’s simulating what the plane would be doing in real life.”
Alright, that's just one of several awesome products we saw at the World Ag Expo this week so stay tuned for future content in future episodes.
Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.
