Delair Counts on a Bumper Crop with Launch of Ag Drone Line

A French-based drone provider is planting new seeds it hopes will take root over farms around the world.

Commercial drone solution provider Delair this week launched a new UAV model focused on the agriculture industry — the UX11-Ag.

Built on the company’s current UX11 fixed-wing drone, the new version “combines the productivity benefits of long-range/BVLOS flight operations with highly accurate survey-grade mapping and plant data collection capabilities to enable a new level of decision agriculture,” according to a Delair spokesperson.

The UX11 offers inch-level geolocation as well as sensor packages and multi-spectral cameras for providing plant-level data and measurements such as biomass and chlorophyll levels.

Delair officials say the Delair UX11-Ag adds a new depth of success for large-scale agriculture activities, including inventory control, crop planning, crop health analysis and extraction of key production metrics

Delair CEO Michaël de Lagarde explains:

“The Delair UX11-Ag directly addresses an opportunity in the fast-growing agriculture and forestry segment with a solution that uniquely meets the productivity and ease-of-use requirements of these operations. It fills the void that exists between traditional small-scale solutions such as flight-time-limited quadcopters, and the limited resolution and agility through satellites. We have built on a proven foundation of our UX11 model and created a platform that is both cost effective and high performing to deliver very precise and actionable insights for agricultural stakeholders of all kinds of crops.”

The launch of the UX11-Ag comes on the heels of several recent victories for Delair.

• Last month, Delair acquired “key assets” from defunct drone-data company Airware. The deal provides more data-analytics muscle for Delair’s drone product line as well as enhanced data management tools.
• In September, Delair closed an expanded investment deal with Intel Capital, following a year of collaboration on the Intel Insight Platform. The cloud-based, digital-asset management system will allow Intel to optimize data analytics by leveraging Delair’s aerial capabilities.
• In April, Delair announced the global availability of the UX11 fixed-wing UAVfollowing a round of final tests, a move that allowed the company to set its sights on the growing mapping/surveying drone sector catering to industrial-level markets – construction, oil and gas, utilities, mining, agriculture and transportation.