What happens if you pair artificial intelligence with drones? Among other things you make life easier for tree growers, who can now count, measure, and more efficiently take care of their crop. Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis and Matt Donovan are the developers of Agroview, a Florida startup invention and a 2020 Cade Prize finalist. They explain using basic drone images, Agroview’s AI and data fusion method provides very accurate information on thousands of acres in hours for what normally takes agricultural producers weeks.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Spying on trees, what are they doing out there? It turns out if you pair a drone with artificial intelligence, you'll find out all their secrets. I'm your host, of Radio Cade. Today my guests are Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis and Matt Donovan of Agroview, a 2020 Cade Prize finalist. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

Matt Donovan: 0:54

Thank you, Richard.

Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis: 0:56

Thank you for having us.

Richard Miles: 0:57

So first of all, I have to confess that I'm a sucker for any topic that has the word drone in it. My wife got me a little drone a few years ago and I have to become highly proficient and wasting lots of my time taking pictures pretty much of nothing, but they're pictures from a thousand feet. So it's cool. Right? I'm guessing you all have to be slightly more productive with your time and the technology. So why don't we start Yiannis, if you could describe for us what the core product of Agroview is, which as I understand it marries drones with artificial intelligence to take lots of pictures of trees. So why don't we just start out? Why trees? What are those pictures tell you? And more importantly, what does it tell the person growing trees who presumably is going to buy this product?

Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis: 1:34

Yeah, that's a really good question. First of all, let me start from the beginning of Agroview, so there's some tools, Agroview is a cloud-based application. So actually it's like a software that analyze and visualize the images from drones, but also for ground based sensing system . So why do we developed Agroview for tree crops and vegetables is because we identify that there's same gap. There are not so mainly tools and solutions for specialty crops, like tree crops and vegetables, regarding on drones. And then the main idea here is to convert the data that we collect the information to some kind of practical information, useful information that the growers , the managers can use. There are samples for row crops like wheat, soy , bean , cotton , but very limited solutions that are available for specialty crops. That's why we developed Agroview. And again, the main goal is to convert data. For example, the images that we collect from drones to information, to something that we can really use.

Richard Miles: 2:41

So the real secret sauce here is the AI, right? Because obviously drones have been around a while. UAVs have been around and under development getting rapidly better since the nineties. And I've heard about all these potential applicati