UC Davis Investigates Using Helicopter Drones For Crop Dusting 77
cylonlover writes "Researchers at University of California, Davis, in cooperation with the Yamaha Motor Corporation, are testing UAV crop dusting on the Oakville Experimental Vineyard at the UC Oakville Station using a Yamaha RMax remote-controlled helicopter. The purpose is to study the adaptation of Japanese UAV crop dusting techniques for US agriculture, but not all the hurdles they face are technological."
Hurdles... (Score:3)
Doesn't really seem like a problem - except in california, where realistic, useful legislation rarely passes on a permanent basis.
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Warning, drones may cause cancer in the State of California!
Doesn't everything cause cancer in the state of California?
Will they put little tags on the drones that must not be removed under threat of prosecution?
Regulations -- a poor substitute for commonsense.
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The non-technological hurdles are exactly what you'd expect - government regulations, air-traffic restrictions and (restrictions on) emergency landing procedures.
Doesn't really seem like a problem - except in california, where realistic, useful legislation rarely passes on a permanent basis.
Even if California is as wicked as you say, do you seriously suspect that proponents of some economically useful drone application wouldn't just seek changes at the federal level [uslegal.com] that would preempt whatever state regulations happened to annoy them?
The issue is presently somewhat unsettled(in part because the FAA is a bit jumpy about the safety of a bunch of glorified model aircraft running around without either a Serious airworthiness workup or a pilot whose continued non-splatteredness is directly dependen
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Even if California is as wicked as you say, do you seriously suspect that proponents of some economically useful drone application wouldn't just seek changes at the federal level [uslegal.com] that would preempt whatever state regulations happened to annoy them?
Good question, why don't we ask the medical marijuana dispensary community how that works?
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Based on the continued harassment by the feds, even in the face of relatively strong local support, I'd say that the 'lobby the feds' strategy is working very well for team Law and Order. Based on the relative indifference of local cops to overt pot dealers, I'd say that the 'lobby the states' strategy is working very well for team decriminalization...
There isn't just one lobby at work, here.
hackers just wait for some to hijack one (Score:2)
hackers just wait for some to hijack one and crop dust over area loaded with people.
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And then there will be fewer mosquitoes. They already do that in a lot of cities.
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And then there will be fewer mosquitoes. They already do that in a lot of cities.
And if the drones are filled with mustard gas, there will be fewer people, too.
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But the same things are not poisonous to all life-forms.
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hackers just wait for some to hijack one and crop dust over area loaded with people.
They are not spraying DDT. Most modern pesticides (especially those used in aerial spraying) have little toxicity to humans. When there were protests about the safety of malathion used in aerial spraying to kill medflies in California, the governors chief-of-staff went on TV and drank a glass in front of the cameras [wikipedia.org].
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Never mind the actual safety or lack thereof; "But CHEMICALS!" from the droolers on the Left is the equivalent of "But BENGHAZI!" from the droolers on the Right.
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See, bureaucrats *are* good for something. You'd never have gotten one of the malathion producers to do such a thing!
Disclaimer - I make no claim that this statement is necessarily true; however, it would hardly be the first breathtakingly stupid grand gesture made by somebody who believed a deceptive PR campaign.
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The chemical use was Malathion. It is not as safe as you claim. Emphasis added by me.
Malathion itself is of low toxicity; however, absorption or ingestion into the human body readily results in its metabolism to malaoxon, which is substantially more toxic.[16] In studies of the effects of long-term exposure to oral ingestion of malaoxon in rats, malaoxon has been shown to be 61 times more toxic than malathion.[16] It is cleared from the body quickly, in three to five days.[17] According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency there is currently no reliable information on adverse health effects of chronic exposure to malathion.[18] Acute exposure to extremely high levels of malathion will cause body-wide symptoms whose intensity will be dependent on the severity of exposure. Possible symptoms include skin and eye irritation, cramps, nausea, diarrhea, excessive sweating, seizures and even death. Most symptoms tend to resolve within several weeks. Malathion present in untreated water is converted to malaoxon during the chlorination phase of water treatment, so malathion should not be used in waters that may be used as a source for drinking water, or any upstream waters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion [wikipedia.org]
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during the chlorination phase of water treatment,
But we only drink Kool-Aid around here. Who gives a shit about the drinking water?
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http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/malagen.pdf [orst.edu] ( PDF warning ).
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That's hilarious, I thought you were kidding. I remember an amusing publicity stunt in which a scientist pwned Ralph Nader by declaring that he would eat as much plutonium as Nader would consume caffeine, but this is the first time I've heard of someone actually putting their money where their mouth is.
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Historical reminder: DDT was not banned because of its human health effects. It is somewhat toxic, but no worse than a lot of other stuff we spray on crops today. It was banned because of its effects on other animals in the environment.
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We already have completely autonomous tractors on the farms... completely robotic - plowing, reaping, harvesting.
Oh, an autonomous tractor run amuck - oh! the horror! - but we do not hear of it because there are sufficient safeguards it doesn't happen.
So what's the big deal about a robotic crop duster?
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Given crop dusting is generally done 100' AGL, air traffic isn't as big a deal (you truck in the UAV - even regular crop dusters need a ground support vehicle, so you're having to drive there anyhow). Emergency landings generally you plop right down on the field. It's unmanned, so falling down is an option. You'll trample some crop, but the same ha
Crop Dusting is expensive and dangerous (Score:3)
This sounds like a decent application- using GPS this could be completely automated.
Monsanto loves crop dusters (Score:1)
Be aware that Monsanto's RoundUp herbicide is designed to exterminate all plant life except their GMO animal hybrids. It does this through its main component glyphosate [wikipedia.org] interfering with the shikimate pathway [wikipedia.org] present in all plant life, including the intestinal flora in your gut which is essential to human health and even survival.
Sure, flying just above ground level and jumping over water pipes and flying under power lines while crop dusting is fun and sexy ... but only if you avoid thinking about your role
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Wow, is that a specious argument. "You can spray RoundUp from a cropduster, and RoundUp is bad, therefore crop dusters are bad". By the same argument, I can use a car to do a drive-by shooting, therefore cars should be outlawed.
There are a thousand other things you can spray from an aircraft: pyrethrin insecticides, narrow-targeted herbicides, antifungal and insecticidal bacteria, insecticidal nematode eggs, and so on. Many of these practices meet organic standards.
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Today's NY Times advocated that guns can be used in drive-by shootings, so guns should be banned.
Yes, clearly they should have advocated that cars should be banned, as the actual cause of the problem is the vehicles that are used to drive-by.
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Flying small aircraft low to the ground for hours at a time is dangerous.
Oooh, cutting edge stuff... (Score:2)
..ten years ago - http://www.gizmag.com/go/2440/ [gizmag.com] and http://rmax.yamaha-motor.com.au/ [yamaha-motor.com.au]
Dusting! (Score:1)
I love th3e term "crop dusting". Whoever invented it deserves their spin-doctoring millions. When I think of "dusting". I think of my grandma using a mild feather duster to remove a bit of dust from her ornaments. I would never think of soaking a field with a few tons cancer-causing chemicals. Hooray for semantics!
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Then blame the bakers, who have been dusting pastry with sugar probably since the middle ages.
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$1m en 1920 est $11.6m en 2013. Recherchez les faits avant que tu ecrivez, vous laide, odereux American fatso homme.
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I came across a few articles today that were "of interest to you". I read them, and inevitably, I scrolled to the comments.
Maybe I'm just intentionally naive, but some of the things people are willing to say to complete strangers online are absolutely appalling. I'm sure that I am as guilty as anyone at one point or another, but that's beside the point.
If anything, the Internet revolution that will be reflected upon in 100 years will be known as the time when we really began to discover the evils of the h
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Remote flatulence (Score:1)
We have all these amazing advances in technology, but all we ever want to use them for is surreptitiously farting on people. The world never changes.
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Meh. These drones still have pilots, they're just not on board the plane / helicopter. A lot of the skills will be transferrable, and for those that aren't, there are always simulators. Pilots trained on nothing but video screens may be missing some kinesthetic sense of the aircraft, but I'd argue that that's not very useful for modern fly-by-wire passenger jets in any case.
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Honestly, I don't buy into the "everything's coming up drones" hype for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Nobody's going to droneify a passenger jet, the safety calculus just doesn't work. But for aerial reconnaisance (police, traffic, news, search and rescue) with no cargo, the story changes. You can't make a useful manned aircraft that weighs less than half a ton or so, so you have to ask a new question:
If it's flying over your children, would you rather it weighed 2000 pounds or 2?
Safety's still an i
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Safety's still an issue, of course, but I'd be willing to accept much less stringent safety requirements if the only consequence of a worst-case scenario crash was some bruising and a nasty cut that might need stitches.
Ask yourself what the result of being hit with a 2lb drone falling from 500 feet is, and then try this comment again.
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It's got wings and propellers to lower its terminal velocity and spread out the impact, so it's going to hurt a lot less than a 2 pound rock. It'd probably hurt as much as getting hit by a falling red-tailed hawk [wikipedia.org], and we let those suckers fly around major cities without flight plans or a pilot's license.
But regardless, I stand by my point: a 2 pound drone will hurt a hell of a lot less than a
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It's got wings and propellers to lower its terminal velocity and spread out the impact, so it's going to hurt a lot less than a 2 pound rock.
Oh, is that the bar? I try not to get hit with 1 or even 0.5 pound rocks from 500 or even 250 feet.
It'd probably hurt as much as getting hit by a falling red-tailed hawk,
Right, because the drone is flexible and covered in feathers. Wait, except it isn't.
But regardless, I stand by my point: a 2 pound drone will hurt a hell of a lot less than a 2000 lb helicopter.
I stand by my opinion that your point is irrelevant and fallacious as it is a false dichotomy.
aerial application is highly regulated (Score:2)
In California, you have to complete a two year apprenticeship to become certified for aerial application.
This is not so much about flying an airplane (which presumably a commercially rated pilot can manage).
It is mostly about handling pesticides, etc. I have not looked but my understanding is that other states have similar requirements.
So even if UC Davis proves the concept, I doubt it relieves the operator of being state certified.
Precision Agriculture (Score:2)
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I don't think the people in the article were claiming it was an end-all solution, or that it was particularly new. They're doing ag extension work in California wine country, where the fields are small, the profit margins are huge, and the crops are difficult to move through with ground-based machinery. Very different situation than what you're experiencing in the Northwest, I'm guessing, and probably ideal for a UAV.
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Why UC Davis is doing this: (Score:3)
Not again... (Score:1)
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I understand this is probably a dull, dangerous job, but do we have to automate every line of work out of existence?
We have to automate every dull, dangerous job out of existence so we can free up the humans to enjoy their lives and focus on the creative pursuits where they really shine.