Unmanned helicopter's ag potential demonstrated at Farm World

Yamaha unmanned aerial vehicle pilot Mohammed Ameen shows off one of the company's unmanned helicopters. Video by Bryce Eishold.

Transcript

00:00My name is Mohamed Amin. I'm a UAV pilot for Yamaha Motor Australia. Behind me here we've

00:08got the Phaser unmanned helicopter, so the Yamaha Phaser-R unmanned helicopter. So this

00:14is a petrol-powered UAV basically, so a drone sort of thing. It's got a 390cc four-stroke

00:21motor powering it. We've got a lifting capacity of about 40 kilos and a functional flight

00:28time of about 60 minutes to 120 minutes. And what is their purpose potentially in agricultural

00:34operations? Look, it can be quite diverse. We've got a big history in Japan. There's

00:403,000 units of these operating where it's been quite widely used for rice paddy field

00:44fly spraying. In Australia, that can translate into that exact same use case, or we can use

00:49it for a lot of different things like pest eradication, invasive species control. We've

00:53got weed control, spot spraying, or just your basic fertilising and spraying that normal

00:57farmers do. So yeah, it's quite diverse that you can use it for. So we've got a transmitter

01:02which basically connects to the aircraft and allows it to fly. And then we've got a little

01:06iPad here, so it's just a basic iPad that we use to control the autonomous side of the

01:10spray system. So basically this aircraft's got the full capability to go out and spray

01:15autonomously and do what it needs to. So these two talk to each other and obviously the whole

01:19system then talks to the aircraft. And then we've got a little base station over there

01:22sitting off in the corner, which we set up at the beginning of every day. So yeah, the

01:26transmitter itself, you've got a few sticks here, which allows you to take it off to move

01:30it around manually. The aircraft's also got a full capability to fly it manually and spray

01:34manually as well if you need to. So there's some tasks that is quite better done doing

01:39it manually as opposed to autonomously. It's a lot quicker, a lot more efficient. So you've

01:42got the capability to do that. And obviously when you're doing a little bit more long distance,

01:45a bit more difficult flying, then you've got the autonomous system to cover up for that

01:48as well.

01:49Beautiful. And what sort of experience do you need to operate one of these machines?

01:53So in terms of licensing wise, if you're going to be doing it commercially, you'd need

01:57a drone license or a REPL and then you'd get an upgrade for this weight category of aircraft.

02:02So Yamaha would be able to provide that for you.

02:05And how much capacity does the aircraft hold in terms of litres?

02:09So in terms of weight, we've got about 40 kilos of weight we can uplift, which translates

02:13to about 32 litres of chemical, liquid chemical that we can carry, and about 30 kilos of granulite

02:19solids that we can uplift.