Amazon’s $20,000 Drone

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Amazon’s $20,000 Drone

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Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) will use drones to deliver packages to people’s homes and businesses. It has introduced one that can be used for home security. The e-commerce company sells one to customers that is much more complex and expensive than anything it sells. The huge flying machine is for agricultural use, primarily to spray crops.

The SHIYANLI 6 axis 15 Liter Agriculture UAV 15kg Drone GPS with Autonomous Flight Joyance Crop Sprayer costs $19,728.39. Shipping is an extra $4.99. The video feed from the drone allows farmers to survey hundreds of square acres of crops and livestock. This saves days, and perhaps weeks, of inspection via tractor or on foot. Some are equipped with 3D cameras to allow verification of how tall crops are. They also can look for flooded areas that might cause severe crop damage.

The most sophisticated drones stream video back to the operator live instead of storing it to be viewed when the drone lands. These streaming devices operate much the way a GoPro camera does. Several of the highest-end drones can be controlled from a smartphone with a downloaded app.

The most sophisticated agricultural drones have software for complex analysis. This covers plant height, plant count, plant health, presence of nutrients, presence of disease, presence of weeds, relative biomass estimates and 3D/volumetric data (piles, patches, holes and hills).
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This drone can carry insecticide that can be dropped via the operator’s controls.

To cover a large area accurately, agricultural drones fly fixed grids so no portion of their survey can be missed.

Shandong Joyance Intelligence Technology is a company based in Shandong, China. It has been in the complex drone business since 2013.


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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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