Autonomous Aircraft Pyka. Autonomous Agricultural Drone Capable of Pollinating 55 Ha/hour

About the developer

Pyka LLC is an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny based in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia ded­i­cat­ed to the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of Pyka autonomous elec­tric air­craft that make the appli­ca­tion of agro­chem­i­cals safe, easy, fast, accu­rate and eco­nom­i­cal — even in dif­fi­cult ter­rain.

It is known that Pyka LLC raised $11 mil­lion from such giants as Prime Movers Lab, Y Com­bi­na­tor, Grey­croft, Daa Col­lec­tive and Bold Cap­i­tal Part­ners for the devel­op­ment of the start­up.

Peculiarities

Below are the main fea­tures of the Pyka drone pre­sent­ed by the devel­op­er.

• Load capac­i­ty 204 kg
• 46 m is enough for take­off and land­ing
• A reli­able pow­er plant con­sists of three BLDC motors con­trolled by a con­troller of our own design
• Pow­er plant pow­er 20 kW
• Cruise speed 145 km/h
• Equipped from the ground up with a spray sys­tem built around a patent­ed high speed cen­trifu­gal pump that deliv­ers chem­i­cals to a pair of light­weight car­bon fiber spray bars.
• The spray sys­tem is con­trolled by a vari­able speed, soft­ware-con­trolled appli­ca­tion that deliv­ers chem­i­cals exact­ly where they are need­ed.
• Appli­ca­tion rate (includ­ing refu­el­ing, rota­tions and bat­tery replace­ment): 34 ha/hour at a water con­sump­tion of 18.9 l/ha; 55 ha/hour at a water con­sump­tion of 7.6 l/ha
• The autonomous flight sys­tem ensures accu­rate and safe oper­a­tion, allow­ing the air­craft not only to fly accu­rate­ly at ultra-low alti­tudes, but also to avoid obsta­cles encoun­tered.
• Mul­ti-lev­el con­trol cou­pled with auto­mat­ic failover pro­vide high­ly reli­able autonomous con­trol
• Sep­a­rate high-lev­el proces­sors, cou­pled with a high­ly reli­able FPGA (FPGA or Field-Pro­gram­ma­ble Gate Array), guar­an­tee the ver­sa­til­i­ty and safe­ty of the flight com­put­er from Pyka LLC. This archi­tec­ture allows the com­put­er to com­mu­ni­cate with more than 30 actu­a­tors and sen­sors simul­ta­ne­ous­ly while exe­cut­ing com­plex path plan­ning algo­rithms.
• Pow­er is sup­plied by redun­dant, replace­able lithi­um poly­mer bat­ter­ies devel­oped by Pyka LLC. Each unit com­bines best-in-class pow­er and ener­gy den­si­ty with a fail-safe ther­mal man­age­ment sys­tem.
• For accu­rate autonomous flight, the oper­a­tor just needs to enter the main para­me­ters of the mis­sion, and the patent­ed soft­ware will han­dle the rest (Taxi, Take­off, Flight, Land­ing)
• Thanks to the lat­est 3D aer­i­al map­ping tech­nol­o­gy and opti­mized flight path plan­ning, the air­craft always knows where obsta­cles are and how to avoid them.
• Can work in both wide and small areas
• Able to fol­low a pre­de­ter­mined tra­jec­to­ry to with­in one meter, both hor­i­zon­tal­ly and ver­ti­cal­ly, even in gusty con­di­tions
• Thanks to built-in sen­sors, it sprays in pre­cise tra­jec­to­ries, with con­stant wind cor­rec­tion (to min­i­mize drift). This uses few­er chem­i­cals per hectare and dras­ti­cal­ly reduces the risk of acci­den­tal spills.
• Con­sumes less ener­gy than elec­tric vehi­cles and has very few mov­ing parts, giv­ing them ver­sa­til­i­ty in the air at a com­pet­i­tive price

Appearance

Availability

Autonomous air­craft Pyka is in the launch phase. To clar­i­fy infor­ma­tion about coop­er­a­tion and acqui­si­tion, the devel­op­er asks to con­tact them using one of sev­er­al meth­ods avail­able on the offi­cial web­site.

Video

Video from the devel­op­er using the Pyka autonomous air­craft.