Successful experience of using drones in the agro-industrial complex of Russia

The issues of digitalization of agriculture are now the most relevant. In our country, there is an excellent example of using drones to fly around fields over large areas.
The agricultural holding “SPEP” has several flagship developments. For example, the field history cloud service, which stores digitized field maps. The maps were obtained using a UAV. Using this service, you can collect and analyze all the information for each field: from the work of equipment on the ground to soil characteristics.
A lot of operations are performed in the STEPPE by quadrocopters, and harvesters and tractors are equipped with unmanned systems with GPS.
“Quadcopters this year proved their effectiveness in sunflower cultivation, when traditional sprayers cannot be used,” said Andrey Neduzhko, CEO of STEPPE.
In June of this year, Agroholding specialists began testing a drone port, an autonomous station for basing agrodrones that serve farmland, the press service of the agricultural holding reports. The device allows you to control the flights of quadrocopters remotely, from anywhere in the world with Internet access, without pilots leaving for a specific field.
Quadcopters are widely used in the technological processes of the Agroholding: with their help, they treat the fields with plant protection products, monitor the condition of crops, control technological processes, and conduct aerial photography of the fields.
Now drones are controlled by pilots from the ground, but with the introduction of drone ports, the process will be automated and centralized. A flight task arrives at the droneport platform from the mission control center, after which the quadrocopter takes off autonomously, completes the task and returns to the base station for automatic charging. At this time, all received photo and video materials are remotely transmitted through the droneport to the data processing server. The droneport can be used all year round: it is sealed and maintains the required temperature.
The development of the drone port is a project of the Russian company Aeromax for the Agroholding STEP. Aeromax is also working on the creation of a domestic agricultural drone.
Andrey Neduzhko, General Director of Agroholding STEP:
“Successful testing of the drone port and further scaling of the project will make it possible to create a single flight control center in the company. This optimizes processes and will reduce the costs of operating agrocopters. Steppe Agricultural Holding is implementing a program to expand the use of unmanned vehicles and is working with Russian companies to create domestic solutions for the agricultural industry.”
Sergey Akhmetshin, CEO of Aeromax:
Aeromax has its own production of civil aviation systems of helicopter and aircraft type, various payloads and ground control stations. We consider it very important and promising to develop unmanned technologies in agriculture to reduce production costs and improve crop quality. Now we are actively working on the creation of a domestic agricultural drone. We have scientific and technical potential, which will allow us to find new effective solutions for the agro-industrial complex.”
When compiling the article, materials from the official website of the STEPPE agricultural holding were used.