XAG, one of the top three commercial drone manufacturers of 2021, has launched five new products that will become available globally in 2022. And as was expected, XAG’s new autonomous solutions, which include both drones and ground robots, pack in more efficiency, precision, and safety than the company’s previous models.
Chinese drone-maker XAG has successfully scaled up its agricultural drones across 42 countries and regions over the past eight years. The newly announced farming drones and robots add to the company’s six smart agriculture product lines. Let’s see what’s on offer…
XAG P50 and P100 agricultural drones
XAG’s new agricultural drones, P100 and V50, are more human-centric than before and create possibilities to operate autonomously in “networkless” regions as well.
The XAG P100 drone inherits the classical quadrotor structure with a 40 kg effective payload, while the V50 is based on the company’s popular dual tilt-wing platform.
Both new drones can switch flexibly between the functions of crop spraying, granule spreading, and field survey. At the same time, the three task systems have also been upgraded to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the 2022 drone lineup.
The star of the show, however, is the more advanced SuperX 4 Pro flight control system. While the autonomous flight feature of agricultural drones has typically relied on network coverage and obtaining an RTK signal, SuperX 4 Pro promises to keep XAG P100 and V50 steady for high-accuracy operations even in areas with weak internet infrastructure.
XAG M500 and M2000 remote sensing drones
Apart from precision operation tools, farmers also need efficient ways to obtain field information and crop growth status to make data-backed decisions and reduce labor costs. This is exactly what XAG’s new M series remote sensing drones, M500 and M2000, hope to address.
Following the compact and convenient foldable design of the previous XMission, XAG M500 remote sensing drone (pictured in the title image) supports four types of gimbal cameras with different megapixels and wavebands to meet different mapping and crop scouting requirements. The XAG M500 can help farm managers quantify field conditions and indicators of crop growth, including irrigation, germination rate, crop density and height, pest diseases, and estimated crop yield.
Meanwhile, the M2000 is XAG’s first-ever electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) fixed-wing drone platform. It has been designed for large-scale and high-frequency farmland surveying. The M2000 can fly up to 90 minutes in a single sortie and map an area of up to 533 hectares.
XAG R150 robotic ground vehicle
The new generation of XAG R150 unmanned ground vehicles comes as a scalable open payload platform that can be embarked with different task systems for high-precision crop spraying, fertilization, and mowing.
Also equipped with the SuperX 4 Pro control system, the XAG R150 can drive fully autonomously for a longer duration, performing auto-location of field ridges and visual tracking, and automatically avoiding obstacles among trees. In the meantime, the improved RevoMower 2.0 system can cut grass and weed on a variety of terrains such as farmland, mudflats, and orchards – negating the need for users to sit on a manual driving mower, suffering from loud noise, dust, and mosquitoes.
Autonomous farm success story
XAG says introducing smart agriculture products throughout the full cycle of crop cultivation can bring about dramatic successes. For example, in April 2021, the company launched the “Super Cotton Farm” program in northwest China, where two post-’90s generation farmers managed a 200-hectare cotton field with the help of drones, robots, and AI. After the trial of one planting season, the farm was able to reduce its labor costs by 60% and used 36% fewer pesticides compared to traditional fields.
Read more: DJI releases two new drones in China: Agras T40 and T20P
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