Drones in Agriculture: Mapping in the P4 Multispectral

David Plummer: This is David Plummer and Michael Ferguson from Aerial Influence. Welcome to Episode 2 of Season 3 of our podcast. In this series we are discussing drones in agriculture. Today we want to talk specifically about mapping in the Phantom 4 Multispectral. What makes the Phantom 4 Multispectral special, Michael? 

Michael Ferguson: It's the first drone that has an integrated multispectral camera within the drone. It's RTK, so it’s higher precision. It has six cameras featuring RGB, with narrow bands of red, green and blue. It features red edge and infrared, as well. All of those six cameras can essentially be used in different ways to make algorithms that will help you interpret soil health.

David Plummer: We're not farmers, but there are people out there that understand this side of it. We understand that world of drones and what they can do for you, but depending on what you're growing, those different bands are going to tell you different things about your plants.

Michael Ferguson: We have customers that have used this and they're seeing actionable data. You've got different soil types, different crops, different climates — all of that has to be taken into consideration. The first step is to start making the maps and then diving in to review. It's a combination of results from the drone, then getting boots on the ground and saying, this is something that we identified in the map, does it match with what we're seeing on the ground? Once that is established, you can repeat the process to collect actionable data. 

David Plummer: For example, if you have 500 acres of land, once you've mapped it out, you can reconstruct that map as many times as needed. If you want to map it every day, you can map it every day to see how things have changed in whichever band, or in multiple bands, that you want to use, to tell the proper health of your plant. The other good thing about the P4 Multispectral is while it has a lower resolution camera — two or three megapixels — you can do RGB mapping with it and you can do a 3D map. It's going to be a low-res 3D map, but it would be a 3D map. Something like the Phantom 4 RTK would be able to do, but just at a much lower resolution.

Michael Ferguson: And the Phantom 4 RTK, it's definitely survey-grade because it's a Phantom 4 RTK, but it also has a high-resolution camera. It has a mechanical shutter, so you can actually use both of those, but obviously the Phantom 4 RTK is just going to give you color. You can survey tons. 

David Plummer: We assume people who are working in agriculture are going to know what RTK stands for — real time kinematics.

Michael Ferguson: Real time kinematics is constantly looking at the satellites, getting information from the satellite and then feeding those corrections to the remote and also the drone, similar to triangulating it. 

David Plummer: It's GPS on steroids. It's giving you that centimeter-level accuracy that you're not going to get from a GPS signal. While GPS is great, RTK is going to make it exact. It's the same kind of technology that farmers are using in their self-driving tractors. It's how they create those perfect lines down the field when there's nobody actually in the cab, or if there is somebody in the cab, they're not actually driving it sometimes. We wanted to explain that to people, as well. This is an upgrade, not all drones have that; it's very few and far between. Phantom 4 RTK and the Phantom 4 Multispectral are the two drones that you want to look at for those. 

Thank you guys so much for checking out Episode 2. We’ve got Episode 3 coming up next, talking farming and agriculture. We're going to talk about DJI Terra, what that program is and how it can be useful on the farm. We’ll see you next time.

Prefer to listen? Enjoy this episode as a podcast!

In the second episode of our podcast centering around agricultural drones, we narrow in on the mapping capabilities of the Phantom 4 Multispectral, and just what makes it so special.

Michael Ferguson