Maintaining a solar farm that spans several acres can require the deployment of a fleet of personnel to remove weeds and clean the panels. Hylio has developed a drone that can help automate solar panel maintenance.
The Hylio AG-210 is a small and nimble drone from the Texas-based company. All of Hylio's UAS, including the AG-210, are FAA approved and NDAA compliant, meaning they meet regulatory requirements for safe flight in residential, mixed-use areas and government sites. The drone's lightweight and compact design makes it easy to set up and operate by one person without sacrificing performance. The AG-210 features a 2.6-gallon tank and can spread product swaths up to 20 feet wide, or it can pinpoint sprays to within inches using RTK GPS location. The AG-210 can treat up to 15 acres per hour at an application rate of 1 gallon per acre, and with Hylio's proprietary swarm control software, even greater coverage can be achieved using multiple drones simultaneously.
“We specifically designed the AG-210 to provide high-precision treatment in areas where negative environmental impacts are to be avoided, such as solar panels on farmland where crops are grown. With the AG-210, maintenance teams no longer have to apply herbicides with a backpack sprayer, walk to cover acres of fields, or drive equipment through fields to spray,” said Arthur Erickson, Hylio co-founder and CEO of Hylio. “The AG-210 will make solar farm management more efficient. It can also be used to clean records to remove dust and other debris.”
The AG-210 Enterprise Kit includes the fully autonomous four-rotor UAS platform equipped with a high-precision spray system consisting of a 2.6-gallon tank, TeeJet nozzles and electronic flow meters. The AG-210 is equipped with two wide-angle radars so it can detect and avoid obstacles in real time, an integrated HD camera and redundant GPS units.
The AG-210 can be flown in either autonomous or manual flight control mode. And up to three UAS can be controlled from a single ground station while completing fully automated operations. Each Hylio drone also comes with a Hylio GroundLink Controller, an all-in-one tablet/RC controller solution developed by Hylio that allows the operator to seamlessly switch between autonomous and manual operations. To fly in autonomous mode, operators simply need to define an area to treat, enter how much product to apply, press “Take Off,” and the drone does the work. As the Hylio drone applies material in the field, a series of sensors transmit real-time access to data such as GPS position, flow rate, altitude and more. All flight and treatment data is stored in the operator's account and allows access to historical application maps, maintenance data and more via the Hylio interface.
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