A Calgary-based company aiming to change the face of drone mapping in Canadian agriculture is this year’s winner of the $20,000 top prize at the Agri-Trade Ag Innovation Awards hosted by AFSC.
Threshold UAV was selected as the top innovator by a panel of four judges at the awards presentation at Agri-Trade in Red Deer on November 6. The company’s presentation of their swarm mapping technology topped the four other presentations to earn this year’s top spot.
WHY IT MATTERS: Advanced drone capabilities can make field mapping quicker, more accurate and more affordable for today’s farmers.
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Over the past three years, Threshold UAV CEO and founder, Mac Hunik, and his team have developed the SwarmBox, an all-in-one swarm mapping drone system that can cover 20 acres per minute with 10 drones. The drones, weighing in below 250 grams, are able to be operated without a special license, and they can handle winds of up to 55 km/h, which is an important factor in places like southern Alberta.
“The way that we feed people is changing faster now than ever before. In time of uncertainty, data-driven decision making takes guesswork out of the equation,” Hunik said.
“Recently, artificial intelligence and computer vision have begun to unlock new efficiencies on the farm, whether it’s damage quantification for crop insurance, locating rocks for picking or creating prescription maps for precision spraying.”
That’s where drone mapping comes in, he said. And although traditional drones have been useful to this point, they do have their inefficiencies.
“Drones have key issues when it comes to broad acre Canadian farms. These issues limit the ability of drones to meet the data input needs of next-gen AI solutions … The sheer size of broad acre fields poses a core problem. It simply takes too long to survey entire sections. Our solution is what we call swarm mapping.”
Threshold’s swarm mapping strategy puts multiple drones into action simultaneously with a control software working collaboratively with the swarm to collect imagery of vast areas.
“Swarm mapping resolves issues of licensing, battery life and operator skill. With a single click, operators can command a mapping swarm to quickly survey large areas,” Hunik said.
Hunik said the technology has been tested in the Lethbridge area, where the drone swarm has handled the heavy southern Alberta winds well.
“Because we’re distributing the load to multiple drones, the impact on the battery life is significantly less. And we were able to, for the most part, battle through those high winds and experiences relatively little issue compared to someone with one drone who would be burning a lot of energy flying one way into the wind,” he said.
Hunik has a background in aerial survey, spending years flying helicopter and aircraft LiDAR missions in the Canadian north. While doing that around 2018, he realized that clients were using the LiDAR data points for AI training purposes, and the beginnings of his vision for Threshold UAV was born.
“I started to think about the need in the future for a data-on-demand type of service where, regardless of the field and regardless of the application, we would be able to apply a point-and-shoot camera system to be able to very rapidly capture that data and preserve it. Because ultimately, in the future we won’t be able to come back and collect that high resolution data again,” he said.
“Change is here in a lot of ways. If climate shift continues to do what it’s doing and if certain economic factors impact the farm reality as we know it, I think there will be a lot of value to be extracted from having a tool like this now for farming of the future.”
Hunik said the $20,000 prize money will be great for Threshold to continue developing their product. But it is the public recognition that he is more excited about.
“It’s just what we need right now. We’re at an inflection point where we’re starting to push products out to the market, so having the audience here to be able to pitch to directly for our product is invaluable,” he said.
“Over the next year, our plan is to dial in the customer experience and make sure our software is ready to rock. After we’ve got a season under our belt with satisfied customers, we’ll look to scale into a SaaS (Software as a Service) model in the future.”
Those interested in getting their hands on a SwarmBox can put their name on a waitlist with Threshold UAV.
