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Drones are making agriculture more exciting by improving efficiency and saving resources. For example, take this invention, a brain child of the brilliant Dr. Soon-Shiong of NantWorks.
You are a farmer. Your crops are doing well, but you have some underperforming regions where the crops are smaller or sick. You do soil measurements, and discover that the region needs aragonite, mixed with some fertilizer. Send in the drones.
This invention allows a drone with two containers to dial in the amount of the soil additives a specific plant needs. Adding nutrients in such a pin-pointed way will assure that only the sick plant will get the help it needs, and no extra additive is wasted on a spray operation.
What is aragonite? The patent says it “may beneficially provide calcium to support pH buffering while also providing trace nutrients and live bacteria, all without increasing the amount of magnesium in the soil as may occur when limestone is used. It is possible to adaptively add aragonite to soil in differing amounts as needed for arbitrarily small regions of a field by analyzing current conditions (once per day). This property makes it especially important for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness that the quantity of aragonite be finetuned in real time based on the current conditions of the field. Moreover, since the ideal amounts of other additives such as fertilizer may depend on the amount of aragonite that is added, while the amount of aragonite and other additives may in turn depend on the quantity of seeds planted or dropped in a given area, it is important to derive relative amounts of multiple payloads to be delivered in combination based on real time conditions.”
Needless to say, the drone is controlled by sophisticated guidance systems such as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and other methods.
Claim 1: “A drone-based payload management system comprising: at least one drone, the at least one drone having a first payload bay and a second payload bay, wherein the first payload bay is configured to store a first payload and the second payload bay is configured to store a second payload; and a drone controller coupled with the first and second payload bays and comprising at least one processor and at least one computer readable memory, the at least one computer readable memory storing software instructions executable by the at least one processor to perform operations comprising: obtaining a location of the at least one drone while the at least one drone is deployed; determining a ground attribute value of a ground surface associated with the location; deriving, based on the ground attribute value, a payload ratio of a first amount of the first payload relative to a second amount of the second payload; causing the first and second payload bays to release the first amount of the first payload and the second amount of the second payload respectively according to the payload ratio; and, after the first and second payload bays have released at least a portion of the first and second amounts, determining a dispersion of one or both of the first and second payloads on the ground surface, the dispersion being an area of actual payload delivery on the ground surface where the one or both of the first and second payloads has been delivered, the dispersion being determined using one or more cameras.”
Title: “Drone-based Payload Management”
US Patent No: 12221214
Filed (US Reg.): 2023-09-12
Granted: 2025-02-11
Assignee: Nant Holdings IP, LLC
