In this article, we delve into RocketDNA's integration of drone and AI technologies, showcasing its transformative impact across agriculture, mining, and critical asset management sectors, with a focus on improving safety, efficiency, and the accuracy of data collection
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The Rise of the Drone
The use of drones has been rapidly growing across industries. In the mining and construction industry alone, PwC predicts that drones will soon become a $28.3 billion global market. Drones offer many benefits, such as enhanced data collection capabilities and cost savings. Agriculture, mining, and critical asset industries are some of the many industries that are leveraging drone technology.
The agricultural industry is increasingly using drones for many applications, including crop monitoring, precision agriculture, aerial surveys, irrigation management, crop yield estimation, and livestock management. Overall, the technology is helping to improve efficiency, reduce resource wastage, and reduce overheads.
The mining industry is also increasingly relying on drones for some important jobs, including mining site exploration, site planning and development, stockpile management, safety inspections, environmental monitoring, regulatory compliance, and emergency response.
Critical asset industries use drones to increase security, maintenance, and operations. They can reduce operational costs, increase safety, and enhance the reliability of critical infrastructure in these industries.
RocketDNA is a leading drone company based in Australia. It is focused on capturing the growth of the mining, agriculture, and critical asset industries via its digital and automated drone-based solutions. Here, we discuss the solutions offered by RocketDNA and how they address current challenges in these three industries.
RocketDNA: Mining Solutions
Safety inspections are key to the mining industry. Its operations often take place in locations that are hazardous and not safe for workers to explore.
Drones can help enhance worker safety by removing the need for on-site human workers for many vital tasks such as site exploration, where drones are used to identify potential mining sites; site planning and development, where drones can help to generate 3D models of mining sites; safety inspections, where mining equipment, tunnels, and critical infrastructure can be monitored remotely by drones; environmental monitoring, where drones help collect vital data on the impact of a ming site on the surrounding area; and emergency response; where drones can be used to quickly assess situations in the case of an accident or emergency.
RocketDNA has developed PitView, a geological mapping and geo-data drone technology solution that enables mining companies to access high-resolution open-pit 3D modeling of locations. The solution allows mining companies to inspect and accurately map geological features and structures. It also allows for the analysis of geological features. These capabilities are valuable in mining, as they enable experts to gain valuable insights on a mining site before and during mining operations begin.
PitComply is another solution offered by RocketDNA that is valuable to mining companies. The solution utilizes AI and drone technology to produce comprehensive conformance reports on key geometric parameters, allowing mining companies to assess how closely a mining pit aligns with designs.
RocketDNA: Agriculture Solutions
Agriculture stands to greatly benefit from the use of drones and other AI-enabled technology. In the coming years, farmers will be tasked with producing enough food for the rapidly growing population while overcoming the challenges brought upon by the effects of climate change.
Drones can be used by the agricultural industry to monitor crops by collecting and analyzing photos of farmland. This can help farmers detect disease and pests earlier and limit their impact. Drones are also useful for conducting aerial surveys, which can provide important information on topography, elevation and soil composition, allowing farmers to make vital decisions about planting and irrigation.
RocketDNA has developed FarmCount, a drone-based population quantification solution that produces rapid and comprehensive reports on livestock. The system has integrated AI algorithms to ensure highly accurate and reliable results. The benefits of this solution are numerous. It prevents unnecessary stress from being put on the livestock as monitoring can be done via drone footage that is collected remotely, minimizing interruption to the animals. Additionally, the solution eliminates the need for human workers to approach the animals, which can reduce the risk of injuries to workers, facilitating a safer working environment. Finally, the system overcomes the problem of human error in traditional counting methods that rely on in-person counting of livestock. Humans are prone to error, particularly in a situation where calculations are not easily given that animals move around and are not easily differentiated from one another. AI technology is not prone to errors, and figures can be relied on.
RocketDNA: Critical Asset Solutions
Many industries stand to benefit from drones due to their ability to protect critical assets. Such assets, including energy infrastructure, transportation (e.g. railways and ports), telecommunications infrastructure, water infrastructure (such as dams and reservoirs), military and defense bases, nuclear plants, and government facilities, stand to benefit from aerial surveying that can be conducted with drones.
AeroMap from RocketDNA is a solution that uses drones to conduct aerial surveying. Critical asset industries, and others, can benefit from the capture, collection, and processing of the images remotely collected by drones that can give valuable insights into the site being surveyed. Critical asset industries may use these surveys to spot issues early on so they can be fixed before they cause significant problems and have become expensive to resolve.
These surveys can also highlight risks or hazards, assist with maintenance tasks, as well as help companies check they are being compliant. They can also bring down company overheads by reducing labor costs associated with tasks that can be conducted by the aerial survey.
Conclusions
RocketDNA is leveraging drone and AI technology to benefit a range of industries, with a focus on agriculture, mining, and critical asset industries. Overall, the solutions offered by RocketDNA benefit companies by increasing the accuracy and reliability of data collection and processing tasks.
The solutions also often have the impact of improving the safety of the workplace by eliminating the necessity of placing human workers in dangerous or hazardous situations or locations. Additionally, the technology can often reduce costs by streamlining tasks.
Drone technology and AI will likely continue to be advanced for use in further applications across industries.
Resources and Further Reading
AeroMap (2023) Discover Aerial Surveying with Drones [online]. Available at: https://www.rocketdna.com/data-product/aeromap.
FarmCount (2023) Drones in Agriculture [online]. RocketDNA. Available at: https://www.rocketdna.com/data-product/farmcount.
PitComply (2023) Drone Mining Technology [online]. RocketDNA. Available at: https://www.rocketdna.com/data-product/pitcomply.
PitView (2023) Geological Mapping & Geo-Data Drone Technology [online]. RocketDNA. Available at: https://www.rocketdna.com/data-product/pitview.
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