Maintaining a solar farm that spans acres can require an entire fleet of personnel deployed to remove weeds and clean the panels. Hylio has created a drone that can help automate solar panel maintenance.
The Hylio AG-210 is a small and nimble drone produced by the Texas-based company. All of Hylio’s UAS, including the AG-210, are FAA authorized and NDAA compliant, meaning that they meet legal requirements to be flown safely within residential and mixed-use areas, as well as government property. The lightweight and compact design of the drone make it easy to set up and operate by one person, without sacrificing capabilities. The AG-210 has a 2.6-gallon tank and can deploy up to a 20-foot-wide swath of product, or it can spot spray with RTK GPS position to centimeters accuracy. The AG-210 can treat up to 15 acres per hour at a 1-gallon per acre application rate, and even greater coverage can be achieved using multiple drones at once with Hylio’s proprietary swarm control software.
“We created the AG-210 specifically to offer highly precise treatment in areas where you want to avoid negatively impacting the environment, such as solar panels located on farmland where crops are being grown. With the AG-210, maintenance crews no longer have to apply herbicides with a backpack sprayer, walk on foot to cover acres of fields, or drive equipment through fields to spray,” said Arthur Erickson, Hylio co-founder and CEO of Hylio. “The AG-210 will make solar farm management more efficient. It can also be used to clean panels to remove dust and other debris.”
The AG-210 Enterprise Kit includes the fully autonomous, four-rotor UAS platform equipped with a high-precision spraying system consisting of one 2.6-gallon tank, TeeJet nozzles, and electronic flowmeters. The AG-210 is equipped with two wide-angle radars so it can detect and avoid obstacles in real-time, a built-in HD camera and redundant GPS units.
The AG-210 can be flown in either autonomous or manual flight control modes. And, up to three UAS can be commanded from a single ground station as they complete fully automated operations. Each Hylio drone also comes with a Hylio GroundLink Controller which is an all-in-one tablet/RC controller solution developed by Hylio which allows the operator to seamlessly switch between autonomous and manual operations. To fly in autonomous mode, operators simply need to define an area to treat, input how much product to apply, press “Take Off” and the drone will do the work. While the Hylio drone is in the field applying material, an array of sensors relays real-time access to data such as GPS position, flow rate, altitude and more. All flight and treatment data are stored in the operator’s account providing access through the Hylio interface to historical application maps, maintenance data and more.
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