New Agriculture Sensor Built on Qualcomm Drone Platform

A precision agriculture company is partnering with an up-and-coming drone-industry player in a bid to revolutionize farming.

SLANTRANGE, a self-described “agricultural intelligence company,” has released the 3p, a multispectral sensors system designed for agriculture drones. Built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight drone platform, the 3p will offer a robust onboard processing solution for drone missions.

A SLANTRANGE press release states the 3p will “provide quantitative metrics about the status, health, and yield potential of crops immediately after a drone flight, enabling growers, agronomists, and drone service providers to scale their operations almost anywhere in the world, with no dependence on high-bandwidth network infrastructure or large-scale computing power.”

The company further states the 3p will deploy a patented  technique for delivering accurate crop measurements under changing sunlight conditions.

“The 3p is the first platform to push aerial imaging analytics directly to the farm, so the value of aerial crop measurement can truly benefit all the world’s farming acres, not just the small fraction of acres with high-bandwidth network access,” SLANTRANGE CEO Michael Ritter said.

Said Bakadir, Qualcomm Product Manager added that his company’s Snapdragon is “an ideal platform to provide the processing power for SLANTRANGE’s on-board analytics, and the 3p showcases how our connectivity and compute technologies can not only contribute to the growing commercial drone industry but can help the farming industry.”

The 3p will incorporate SLANTRANGE’s SlantView in-field analytics software that will open up precision agriculture to more precise academic research.

For Qualcomm, the new partnership with SLANTRANGE is one of many victories scored in the drone market recently. In January, security company Alarm.com unveiled plans to create an autonomous drone application to strengthen home and business security systems by combining the company’s multi-sensor awareness software with the Snapdragon Flight platform.

In September, Qualcomm and AT&T launched a research project to determine how drones can effectively operate on wireless networks. The project will address issues related to coverage, signal strength and mobility across network cells to assist in drone functions such as Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS).