Monitoring huge areas of crops can become a mind-boggling challenge with traditional land-operated machinery. Whether we’re talking about ailing plants, weeds, pests, intrusions or soil degradation, it all comes down to knowing exactly what’s going on, where it’s happening and what to do about it. For many farmers this often means strapping on boots for a muddy hike through the crops – with no guarantee of actually finding anything early enough to fix it.
But Bulgarian drone software company Flyver is bringing agriculture into the 21st century.
Founded in 2013, Flyver offers cloud powered aerial surveillance. “Our drones are fully automatic and don’t require any specific license or operator. The system is powered by Azure and we use cell phone networks as streaming servers. That’s basically unlimited range. In other words, no pilots, no technicians, no remote controls. One click and you are airborne,” explains Tihomir Nedev, co-founder of Flyver, in a new Microsoft case study article.
Farmers can plan their flight missions straight from the cloud, assign them to drone operators and monitor their execution from the comfort of their computer, anywhere in the world.
At the tip of a finger, farmers get access to real-time data from the field, high quality footage and total control over flight plans. Any video that is captured by the drone is instantly streamed through Azure in real time and stored on the cloud for later use. “With our solutions, farmers save time, money and efforts in protecting their field,” explains Nedev. Whatever is happening out there in the crops, drones will track it, spot it, report it and save it.
Flyver uses advanced powerful fixed-wing and multirotor UAVs to perform missions. The drones can easily be customized to meet the customer’s specific needs. Precision, duration or streaming quality can be enhanced, as well as the type of sensors and equipment on board. Flyver is a Software as a Service (SaaS), which means that it doesn’t require any setup, and it runs directly from Azure.
This type of technology is helping farmers to become ‘smart farmers’. “At a time when price pressure is high, data and technology can be used to improve and optimise farm operations, improve crop yields, minimize environmental impacts and in doing so improve the bottom line and top line for farms. At Microsoft, we believe that technology can help empower every farm, farmer or player in the agriculture lifecycle to achieve more and drive lower costs and higher margins,” says Mark Torr, senior product marketing manager for IoT & Advanced Anaytics at Microsoft.
Share this story