The Future of Drones

Tony Kramer: Hi, I'm Tony Kramer, your host of the Agriculture Technology Podcast, and I'm sitting down with technology and equipment experts to help you enhance your operation for today, tomorrow, and into the future. In this episode, I talk with Bill Edmondson about RDO UAV solutions. With that, let's dive into the show. Like I said, we are going to be talking about some UAV solutions that RDO Equipment Company has to offer. I'm really excited to bring Bill Edmondson onto the show. Bill is our UAV product manager with RDO Equipment. Bill, to get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, and who you are, and how you got to where you are today?

Bill Edmondson: Thanks for having me, Tony. It's a lot of fun to talk about these things, and I'm excited about them. I met RDO when I had just returned from UAV-related work for the Department of Defense for a few years, and I'd gotten back and I decided, "Hey, there's a way to make a living with this. There's a market here. There's an opportunity in commercial use of these technologies in the US." So I started putting together a business and found out that I was good at the sales part, I was good at the flying part, but I wasn't good at making drones.

[laughter]

Bill: At about a 50% failure rate, I thought, "I need to start looking around, see who's selling these things pre-built and ready to go." I did my research and I found that RDO had a really good handle on where the business was. This was early, mid-2000 teens, and so this was early in the industry as far as survey drones go. I just really liked the products that RDO had to offer, and so we were talking about it and had a good relationship, and they asked me if I'd like to come on board. I've been with the company ever since.

I started out as a product specialist, helping our customers understand the product, help training those customers, and also training our account managers on the products and the solutions. I worked my way through the company. I'm happy to say I'm the UAV product manager now, so basically running the UAV side of the business. Got a great team to work with, and a great bunch of account managers, and I've really enjoyed working with the company. Yes, that's what got me here.

Tony: Great to have you on the show, Bill. You come with an immense amount of UAV knowledge and experience, so I'm very excited to talk about some of these solutions. We have a few different offerings, or a few different solutions coming in with different platforms, and some different use cases based on what you are looking to do with a UAV, whether that be the ag industry. We do a lot on the construction side. We have a lot of contractors and construction-based companies that utilize UAV technology.

There are some solutions on the ag side, so we are going to talk both in this podcast, but why don't you just start out, Bill, tell our listeners a little bit about the different platforms that we have to offer, and what those solutions are, whether it be the ag side or the construction side.

Bill: Sure. I think our goal, from the beginning, was to be a solution provider. What that means is it's not manufacturer or product or platform specific. It's having a menu of different tools that we can pull from to create solutions that work for our customers, regardless of what industry or what their use case is. In order to do that, it's important that you have a broad understanding of the different types of products that are available, what the customers are looking for, et cetera, what price points they can afford to work within, what type of return on investment they're looking for, for their different industries.

Then basically what the technology is doing, and who are the best manufacturers at the time, what's their key value, and then understanding a broad range of usages for the platforms, and then applying them towards the different industries. You're right. We do work in construction, we work in agriculture, we work in all the different varieties and variations on that. For example, when you say construction, are you talking about building a building? Are you talking about building a highway? Are you a paver? Are you a civil engineer? Are you building a dam? Are you inspecting power lines? This is all relatively under that construction umbrella.

What we try to do is understand what the products are capable of, and then we apply them to the industry as it stands. As a result of that, what we've done is we've developed a really nice, not too complicated, variety of different products that overlap each other. We also have a variety of software products to take that information that you're deriving from your drone and make it useful. We're not out there to fly drones just to see things in the sky, we're out there to get a useful data or useful information that we can take action with. That's where the return on your investment comes from. Regardless of whether it's agriculture or construction.

What we've done is we've looked at, okay, there's multirotor, which is your helicopter style. Everybody is familiar with multiple little rotor spinning type of drone that hovers and also moves laterally and vertically. Then you've got your fixed wing, which is more like an airplane. There's a variety of different reasons to use them both. In that product line, what we've got is the DJI line, which I think most people are familiar with. When they think of a drone, I think they probably imagine a DJI-shaped drone. That's a multirotor system. DJI is the largest manufacturer of commercial drones in the world.

It just makes good sense for us to work with them. We've got a lot of customers that are interested in a variety of different usages. We sell the enterprise line of the DJI product, as well as the agriculture line. We do dabble a little bit in the consumer grades for some of our public safety usages, et cetera, but for the most part, we're in the enterprise and the ag line. Those are our commercial products. DJI makes a nice little drone. It's relatively inexpensive.

A little bit less wind capacity, a little bit less acreage than some of our other products, but if you just need something to get in, "Hey, I need to do some mapping, I've got a smaller area." Or, "I just need something that basically I can fit under the seat in my truck and I need to do a quick topo," et cetera, et cetera. That's the DJI product line. We also carry the larger DJI units. When you're getting into your LiDAR, you're starting to get into thermal, starting to get into multispectral as well. We're really happy to be working with them. They've been very good with support, and they have a very good solid product line.

As you know, however, there's also a need for drones that are maybe not made in China, or maybe need to have specific company of origin specs to them. As a result, we heard that and we reacted to that, so we carry the Vision Aerial multirotor drone, which is NDAA compliant, but the Vision Aerial is made in Montana. Those are all NDAA compliant materials and sourcing. These drones will carry a little bit more weight. We can carry up to 11 pounds with the Vision Aerial drones. They're also very flexible. Those drones are flexible in the payloads that you can carry.

We're able to carry thermal and LiDAR and multispectral and hyperspectral and video, as well as mapping. It is a whole variety. Basically, if somebody is trying to hang some sort of a payload from a multirotor drone, we can do that with Vision Aerial. We're very happy to be partnered with them. We've been selling their products now for, I think, around four years. We have a very good relationship with them. They're based out of Bozeman, Montana. Very transparent company, easy to work with, great folks, very forward-thinking and very active in the UAV market in the US.

That covers our ability to do smaller areas. That covers our ability, between DJI and Vision Aerial, our ability to do inspections, to do tight areas, to do hovering type of inspections, to do mapping. We are a little bit limited in acreage compared to, say, a fixed-wing drone. What Wingtra allows us to do is use a more typical airplane type format, which is a much more efficient way to fly. We can do up to 700 acres per flight with a Wingtra drone. The cool thing about Wingtra is it does actually hover when it's taking off and landing.

You can get in and out of very tight areas, like a helicopter, straight up and down, and then transition into regular airplane flight to do much more efficient. Then, of course, with the Wingtra product, we've got the ability to do LiDAR as well, and multispectral and standard photogrammetry mapping as well. We're very happy with that hardware palette. Then on the software palette, we have the ability to focus on specific payloads. We have software solutions for LiDAR, we have software solutions for thermal, we have software solutions for topography.

A lot of that wraps into our main offering in UAV software, which is called RDOai, which is an online platform that allows us to take that information that we're getting from our drones and say, "Where is the surface I flew on Monday? How is that compared to the surface I flew on Tuesday? How has that changed? Do I have more dirt or less dirt on site? Which vegetation is where? Is it in the way of this? Is the vegetation, these areas that are vegetated, I need to see the topography underneath them. I'd like to scrub that off. I'd like to see just the ground underneath it." "Are my power lines sagging? If so, how much are they sagging? How far apart are these?"

"I've got an area where we just cleared all the excavation and we're going to put buildings in here. I want to upload my three-dimensional building designs and compare them to the surface. How much dirt do I need to bring in? How much do I need to take off?" "Hey, I've got a structure here that we're going to change in some way. I've got a three-dimensional map of that building as a design. I want to compare it to the reality that we just scanned with our drone, and see where we need to make changes." "I've got a bunch of structures that need inspection.

I'd like to make three-dimensional models of those things we're inspecting, and then look at them in 3D and analyze what needs to be changed, where I've got problem points, et cetera, et cetera." That's what RDOai does. It also allows us to do a variety of other things that relate to the work on the ground so we can talk about, "How is the project advancing from the day we started to the day we stopped?" "We have different phases of business. How are we advancing through those? Are we 25% done with this? Are we 30% done with that? Hey, the parking lots were supposed to be paved by this date. We're only 82% there.

As of this date, the way we're trending in this direction, we're not going to be done with that in time," et cetera, et cetera. All of that, taking of that information that you derive from your drone and making it useful, actionable data, that's what RDOai does. That's really what makes the DJI, the Vision Aerial, and the Wingtra drone tick. That's why you buy them.

Tony: We were talking about that a little bit, Bill, before we started. That it's a two-piece. We have the hardware and then we have the software and the solution. A customer comes in and they say, "Hey, I'm interested." Whether that be a construction customer or it be an ag-related customer, "I need a drone for X, Y, Z solutions." That's when our RDO team would then understand the wants and needs, and we would find the right hardware for them. Correct?

Bill: Honestly, I'd start to flip it a little bit. I would say, "What's the solution you need?" Okay, so let's talk about agriculture. I'm a grower, or let's say I'm an agronomist, works for a grower. We're having some yield variation year after year in this particular section of our business. We can't see from the highway or from the road when we drive by what's happening until it's too late. We're green, and then all of a sudden we've got a bunch of die-off. We have some ideas about what it might be, we've done some samples on the soil, we've looked at our irrigation practices, we've looked at the chemistry in our fertilizers. Is there any way we can detect stressed crops before we actually have die-off?

Yes. The answer is yes. Okay. So that's the problem. That's the pain. How do we go about that? I'll open my toolbox at that point, right? What is the crop? When are you flying? How windy is it there? What's your ability to aggregate the data? Do I need to tell you this is dead here, or do I need to say there's a 32.4% die-off in the red edge infrared information in this? How much can you do your self-analyzation of this, or how much of it is just, "I need to see where I've got stress before," et cetera? Here and here. Then I pull out, maybe that's a Wingtra, with a MicaSense RedEdge-P.

Maybe that's a DJI, with their multispectral on an M3E. Maybe it's an Agras T50 sprayer that we need to target a prescription. How do we build that prescription? Maybe we go out with an M3E, or if you're sensitive to the country of origin, maybe we go with a Vision Aerial that has all the multispectral payloads, et cetera, to do that. We start with the solution, and then we work backwards to the hardware.

Tony: There's definitely a process that you guys have figured out. The more I sit here and talk to you about this, I thought I knew about UAVs in the ag and construction industry, but man, there's just so much more to it, and that's why we have you and your team built out to really help the customers decide and figure out what we do and how we go about it. With RDOai bringing in the data, whether it doesn't matter which type of hardware you're flying, which type of data set you're bringing in, RDOai is helping you figure out a lot of this stuff, and that is specific to RDO equipment. Tell us a little bit more about RDOai and what customers on both the ag and construction side can utilize that for.

Bill: Sometimes I get teased a bit for using so many analogies, but I think this is a good one. If I was to go grocery shopping and I'm going to cook a meal, and I went and I bought five or six different types of vegetables, and I bought three or four different types of bread, and I bought some different spreads, and I bought three or four different beverages, and I put them all out on the counter in my kitchen, and somebody was to say to me, "Which meal are you going to make?" I would say, "Well, I can make all kinds of different stuff with these ingredients." Okay?

What RDOai allows us to do is have a kitchen, and our data is the stuff we went and got at the grocery store. I've got over here, for example, I've got LiDAR data. I've got a bucket of that. I've got a bucket over here of design file. The stuff that my designers, my architects, or my road construction crew, or the county, or the state sent me a survey that I have to match. Here's my area that we're going to work on. Here's the topography. I've got some topography maps and I've got an ortho map of what we're doing. How can I take all of these different disparate ingredients and turn it into usable information?

Well, the LiDAR data, for example, in this case, might be telling me where the topography is underneath the trees. Okay? The design data is where we need to be when we're done. When we deliver this product to the customer, here's what they want. I'm going to put that in there. I'm going to take the topography data from a survey the county or the government did years ago, and compare that. Is that still accurate? I'm looking at all of those all mixed up in a bowl at the same time, and I'm taking things out and putting things in until I get what I need to know. Then that would be the solution.

What RDOai is there to do is allow you to take all this information. Now, here's some other things you can do with RDOai. Let's say that we're two or three months into a solar project. 5,000 acres, and we're putting up solar panels. Okay. We showed up, before we broke ground, we had to look and see how much undulation there is in the ground compared to how smooth it needs to be for the excavate. The excavation is done, we used our drone, we flew to get that. We compared it to our design. That's how we used RDOai to start. Now we're doing what's called racking. We're putting all of these rows where the panels are going to sit on.

Where are the deliveries coming in? Are they anywhere near where we're going to actually use them? I've got a snapshot every Wednesday of the job site. Why are we putting pallets and pallets of racking material over here in the corner every day when we're actually building over here? Why don't we have them deliver it over here so you can see exactly what you're doing every day? Okay, I've got a design that shows where the racks need to be, and I can lay that against the map I'm getting every day when we fly, and I can see, and I can run an analytic in RDOai. It'll tell me 34% of this circuit has been racked by Tuesday at 3:00 PM.

I can see exactly how much and where I'm at on it, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody comes in and says, "Something's going on on the ground." I really want to make sure that everybody can see that. That person can grab their phone and run out to the job site, jump out of the truck, and take pictures of it and upload it to RDOai. Then you look in RDOai, there's little red triangles right there. You click on it, it shows you, "Hey, Bob, Mary, Joe, or Steve saw this problem, and here's what it is, and here's where we need to change this." Easily, instantly actionable in the office and on the site.

That same person could say-- Let's say Tuesday they had a problem, Wednesday we had a flight, they could come back on Thursday with their phone and walk over and see, "Oh, the flight from Wednesday is telling me that this has changed here. I can make a change here." You can be in the field and you can be on the computer. Some other things you can do with RDOai. You can plan your flights. I've got these operators, I want them to fly these five or six sites, with these five or six drones, and these are the results I want processed. Your pilots can check in and see where they're supposed to fly, what drone they're supposed to fly, and what the processing needs to be, and what the deliverable needs to be.

Check in due to flight, check off that they did it, and process it. The entire workflow, all the way to the point, let's say, back to my solar example, now we've got our solar panels in, everything's installed. We're about to sell this to Minnesota Utility, and they're going to start making electricity with it, but we have to be within a certain spec for power. Let's fly. Let's do a thermal inspection of the entire site and see which panels have different variations in temperature. We can discern then how well they're performing. We can pre-commission the system at the site before it goes out.

That's just a solar example. Let's say it's a highway project, where we have to check against grade, things like that. Same type of thing. I've got this design, I've got machine control files going out to my grading equipment. I know what our finish grade needs to be. I know what the slope needs to be on this on-ramp or off-ramp, how far away are we from it? Why is everything 2.3 centimeters too low on this end of the project? According to my flight, it looks like our machine control files are off. Why are they off? Let's pull the design file out and look.

Oh, the design file is set in this coordinate system in the elevation instead of that coordinate system in the elevation. We made a mistake in the survey. Boom. You can do all of that in RDOai. That's really what it's for. It's your desktop to take all this disparate information and derive a solution.

Tony: Really is an all-encompassing solution tool, solution-providing tool. It's not just an output of that raw UAV data there. You just explained so many more use cases for RDOai and why somebody would want to, or be able to, utilize RDOai as a solution. Whether it be the ag or construction industry, RDO has a portfolio of different hardware to offer you. Then you couple that with the RDOai desktop software solution. It's an all-encompassing tool, all-encompassing solution for our customers.

Now, some of the customers you've worked with, Bill, in your time with RDO, do you have any sort of a success story that you'd like to share with our listeners about a time? Maybe there's a specific customer you worked with, or a specific RDO location you worked with that, at the end of the day, when that sale or that solution was completed, it really put a smile on your face?

Bill: I'll do two of them, just to show the variety. We've got a customer, he's got a crushing business, and he's got a couple pits. He's pulling the material out of the pits, he's bringing them to the crusher location. He's crushing it into a specific type of aggregate material based off of what his customers need at that point. He's got to pay taxes on it. He's got to do inventory every year, right? He needs to know where his inventory is at the time that he needs to pay the taxes on it. He has to balance that against his revenue throughout the year. Then he has to ascertain how much material he's got on site, what his margin is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

He buys a little drone from us, and he goes out and he gets a snapshot and he sends it, has it processed, and we help him get it correct, et cetera. Get that off to his accountant, who then sends it off. He's like, "I didn't realize that we've got all this material over here, that I forgot about it, that hasn't been used, it's been behind this berm. I think we could probably recrush this for this project. I forgot that was there, but I don't know how much is there." We showed him, "Well, look, all you have to do is pull this into RDOai, you draw a polygon around it, you hit measure, and it tells you exactly what the area and the volume of that is." "Oh, wow. This is great. I hadn't thought of that. Dah, dah, dah."

He ends up buying a drone. He's flying weekly now. Now he's got to the point where he was flying once a year to get for a tax evaluation. Now he's flying weekly and comparing the volumes in the piles to the volume that the scale on his crusher is giving him, and finding error, and actually fine tuning his scales, and fine tuning the crusher's scale, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure that he's got exactly the right amount of material. He's figured out that some of his piles, he's got two different types of aggregate, and they're starting to coalesce. Where they coalesce, he can't use that material.

He's figured out how much material he's losing because he's got mix. Because his volumes are too close together. The drone paid for itself on the first flight. We've got another customer who's working with us right now to use the same software, RDOai, to evaluate the species of the trees in a forest, because they can only cut certain ones, they can't cut others. They are also able to see which trees have bird's nests in them, and how big the bird's nest is tells them whether or not that's a species that's protected or not.

They can also evaluate the topography underneath the trees to see how, when they remove the trees, how that will affect erosion, and how that will affect the watershed and the rivers and streams below that and impact the fisheries. They're doing that with the same product. It's RDOai. They're using a variety of different payloads, and they're flying with different drones than my aggregate guy. They're able to tell these different species from these different trees.

They're also able to track where the machinery is on the ground. There's a telematics feedback from the machine, so we can collect that and we can see where each piece of forestry equipment was, and where it was, et cetera, et cetera. So, it's a broad, broad variety of really exciting things to do. I'm literally at a mine on Monday, I'm in a farmer's field on Wednesday, and I'm in a forest on Friday. It's just a lot of fun. Really great products. The challenge is just to help people understand what the thing will do. You know what I mean? What these solutions can do, and help them derive a pathway to get there in a cost-effective manner, that in the long run really helps them with their business.

Tony: Yes. That's exactly why I wanted to bring you on the show, Bill. There is. It's so, so broad. There's so many different solutions, so many different offerings, whether it be you're dealing with a crush site and dealing with volumetrics, or you're in forestry, or ag, or you mentioned inspecting bridges. There's so many different uses for UAVs. RDO, the hardware we have to offer, as well as the RDOai software solution. We've got a lot of things for you no matter what type of customer you are.

Now, if one of our listeners out there, Bill, is curious, they're interested in one of the solutions, or multiple of the solutions that we here at RDO have to offer, where can they go, who can they talk to, to learn more about all of this?

Bill: If you're an RDO customer, you already know who to talk to. Let's say you're buying construction equipment from us, or you're buying agriculture equipment from us. All you need to do is talk to your account manager, and say, "I want to talk to your UAV folks. I've got some questions. You guys sell those things that fly. I'd like to hear more about that." They will get a hold of my team, and we will reach out to you. Yes, it's just that easy. You may not see a drone in every store, but they're all aware that we do that, and we do have a drone division. They will quickly get you in contact with the right people.

Tony: Yes. I was actually, before the show here, I was looking, I believe, online to rdoequipment.com. I believe we have a page specifically designated for unmanned aerial solutions, correct?

Bill: Absolutely. Thank you. Go to our RDO website, type in UAV, go to positioning or technology solutions, and you're going to see that. Of course, there's a form in there as well.

Tony: UAVs are tools that can be utilized. You couple that with RDOai and you've got one heck of a toolbox to work out of. Thank you again, Bill, for taking the time to sit down and chat about this.

Bill: Yes, lots of fun. Best part of my job. Thank you.

Tony: Please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast, if you haven't already. You can subscribe to the show on the many different podcasting apps that we're streaming this out to, such as Apple, Google, Spotify, as well as many others. While you're out there, drop us a review. We'd love to hear what you think about the show. Lastly, make sure to follow RDO Equipment Company on Facebook, Instagram, and X, and also catch our latest videos on YouTube. You can also follow me on X, at RDOTonyK.