Sentera has announced the availability of the company’s new AGX710 gimbaled precision agriculture sensor with plug-and-play integration for DJI’s Matrice 200 Series industrial drones. The AGX710 sensor delivers crop health insights and enables ag professionals to develop high-precision spectral index measurements and run deep learning algorithms on acquired data.
Data from the sensor imports directly into the Sentera FieldAgent Platform, where advanced insights help detect disease, pest, and other pressures, identify deficiencies, and assess nutrition status. FieldAgent’s mobile app offers complete flight planning and execution support for the new solutions. Full integration with DJI’s transmission system delivers live-streaming video and still image download capabilities, and complete gimbal and camera control is available directly from the drone’s remote controller.
“We are excited to deliver such an elegant, high-accuracy product to the market,” said Eric Taipale, CEO of Sentera. “Our customers love DJI drones, and DJI’s new payload developer tools allow us to make it unbelievably easy to add Sentera sensing to an M200 Series platform, and incredibly simple for our customers to gather actionable data from the field.”
The deep integration between the AGX710 and DJI drones comes from DJI’s newly released Payload Software Development Kit (SDK) and accompanying DJI Skyport adapter. Sentera and DJI collaborated to develop the Payload SDK and AGX710 in parallel, ensuring both were optimized for the benefit of the agriculture industry.
“We are proud to have the Sentera team bring their innovative agriculture sensor to our Matrice 200 Series drones,” said Jan Gasparic, Head of Enterprise Partnerships at DJI. “Working together with payload developers like Sentera makes it easier than ever to use DJI drones for specialized applications in the commercial drone industry, giving customers in agriculture, energy, and public safety more access to the tools they need to get the job done.”
The AGX710 attaches to any supported DJI enterprise drone. Based on Sentera’s proven sensor technology, the AGX710 delivers a variety of standard products including high-resolution RGB, normalized difference vegetative index (NDVI), normalized difference red-edge (NDRE), nearly a dozen other specialized index products. In addition, Sentera analytics around stand and emergence, variability, biomass, nutrition, pest, weed, and disease status are compatible with AGX710 imagery.
“Our customers produce dozens of different index products, and use automated analysis tools across so many different applications in agriculture, forestry, and environmental protection. On the Matrice 200 model, customers can snap-in and fly. On the Matrice 210, with two gimbals, we can fly alongside a thermal imager, or future payloads,” said Taipale. “The DJI Payload SDK architecture has really hit the mark for enterprise customers.”
Sentera’s gimbal stabilizes the sensor for optimal positioning during image capture, and allows for the same automated and manual positioning capabilities that users have come to expect from DJI equipment.
