News Structures & Equipment
Fully automated lettuce crop monitoring by greenhouse drones

June 8, 2023 – In spring 2022, Corvus Drones introduced fully automated greenhouse drones for young plant producers and breeders. Operating greenhouse drones is easy and can be done from one’s office. Docking stations for automatic recharging and data upload are the ingredients to make the loop from data collection to reporting fully automated.

“The application includes multiple features. Hydroponic gutters can suffer from misalignment and get no irrigation. This results in wilting plants and less yield. The drone detects the misalignment, and the grower gets an alert with the greenhouse section to check. This saves hundreds of hours of manual inspection per hectare per year” said Frans-Peter Dechering, founder and CCO of Corvus Drones, in a press release.

Growth and size monitoring is the feature to predict yield and adjust crop planning. The software, developed by Corvus Drones Computer Vision partner Track32, does drone image processing and gives an accurate figure about the leaf area development and actual size during the last crop phase. Optional are weight estimate and yield prediction.

The drone crop monitoring and detections are reportedly fully automatic.