Flying machines that can shoot pesticides instead of photos DRONES THAT CAN PLANT 1BN TREES PER YEAR DEVELOPED
China drone-maker DJI is betting on flying machines that shoot pesticides instead of photos, to fend off growing competition in the global remotecontrolled aircraft market.
The world leader in the civilian drones sector is switching its focus from leisure photography to more professional uses for its unmanned aerial vehicles, and it sees agriculture as the future for the burgeoning industry.
DJI’s campus lies within the High Tech Park of the southern city of Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley, where visitors are treated to a showroom featuring an array of drones.
Half the space of the showroom is dedicated to the recreational machines like the Phantom series, while the other half shows off the “enterprise” drones for agriculture, public safety, professional photography or filmmaking. Propelled by rotors, the tiny crop dusting aircraft can carry a liquid payload of 15 kilogrammes (33 pounds) to spray fields.
Piloted from a distance, one drone can cover the same surface as around 30 people and it does the job more efficiently, said Jiang Sanchun, manager of a small company that operates pesticide drones for farmers in northern China.
“Within five years, we went from drones that only took photos to machines specialised in first aid or agriculture,” DJI vice president Paul Xu London: Scientists have developed new drones that can identify ideal places to grow trees and sow one billion plants every year, an advance that may help combat deforestation.
Deforestation and forest degradation make up 17 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions — more than the entire world’s transportation sector, according to the United Nations.
Researchers from a UKbased
told AFP at the company’s
headquarters in Shenzhen. Fighting firesDJI was founded in 2006 in an apartment in
Shenzhen by Frank firm BioCarbon Engineering helped build a drone system that can scan the land, identify ideal places to grow trees, and then fire germinated seeds into the soil. It can plant in areas previously impossible to reach, like steep hills.
The firing drone follows a pre-set planting pattern determined from an algorithm, which uses information from a separate scanning drone, they said. Wang, a young graduate with a passion for model planes. The company now makes almost two-thirds of the world’s civilian drones, according to an estimate by Frost and Sullivan, a market research company. Its overall revenues reached $1.5 billion last year. Xu boasted that DJI “created a new market” in 2013 when it launched its Phantom drone with highdefinition cameras.
Some 75 per cent of its drones are sold abroad, mostly in the United States and Europe, and they are popular among people flying the crafts for fun or to take aerial photos. A drone that landed on the White House lawn in 2015 was a DJI Phantom.
US authorities issued news rules last year that clear the way for small, commercial drones to operate across American airspace, while European Union regulators are trying to catch up. With competition on the rise, the company is looking for new markets.