Sprayer drones.
The world has a handful of those now.
There are fire-fighting sprayer drones that can fly 600 metres in the air to jet extinguishing foams at a fire and douse it just like that.
But the most famous sprayer drones are the ones found flying over fields, playing their part in precision agriculture by spraying insecticides and other chemicals over crops to ensure they stay healthy.
We do not have sprayer drones for animals though. Yet.
But we can imagine; a drone filled with dipping chemicals flying over a pen and making it rain on the cattle, to keep the ticks away.
We wonder how much fun that would be for the cattle. And we wonder how far we are from that technology too; because if we can have a sprayer drone that can offer itself as a commercial cleaner of choice for organisations with lofty building structures, then we can have anything.
But that is as real as it gets – there is a robotics company in Charlotte, North Carolina in the US that develops industrial spraying drones for labour-intensive jobs.
Founded in 2018, Lucid Drone Technologies provides a safer, faster, and smarter alternative to traditional dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks of sending human cleaning personnel up scaffolds and buckets to clean building at high rise buildings.
Drones at your cleaning service. They actually work.
Recently, Lucid announced that it was partnering with telecommunications company T-Mobile in a deal where the un-carrier would be the exclusive provider of IoT connectivity and management for Lucid’s fleet of industrial spraying drones.
“Together, Lucid Drone Technologies and T-Mobile are collaborating to put maintenance teams and exterior cleaning companies out of harm’s way using drone technology for high-risk facilities maintenance work like exterior soft-wash cleaning and high-rise window washing,” the drone maker said in a statement.
“The companies also plan to leverage T-Mobile's industry-leading 5G network in the future to fly drones beyond line-of-sight and power more data-intensive capabilities like video streaming.
“Commercial property management firms and developers make significant investments to keep maintenance teams safe. Expensive liability insurance premiums and equipment fees have facilities leaders looking for new and cost-effective solutions. Enter industrial spraying drone pioneer Lucid Drone Technologies and the Un-carrier to deliver a game changer — drones equipped to clean exterior building surfaces and windows.
“The next generation of Lucid Drone Technologies industrial spraying drones, powered by T-Mobile for Business, can perform exterior washing for commercial building surfaces and windows, including outdoor stadiums and arenas, hotels, and university structures. That means maintenance teams can steer clear of some high-risk tasks, keeping them safer and focused on other mission critical work.”
In the partnership, T-Mobile’s network will reportedly power critical capabilities for Lucid Drone Technologies industrial spraying drones such as real-time sharing of flight data, battery utilisation information, hardware diagnostics, and delivery of firmware and software updates.
Additionally, T-Mobile Control Center will give Lucid Drone Technologies the ability to view and manage the connectivity of their industrial spraying drones. With the automation and provisioning capabilities of T-Mobile’s IoT platform, Lucid Drone Technologies can easily accelerate deployment of their growing fleet. Lucid Drone Technologies will have near real-time visibility to all their industrial spraying drones with the ability to monitor network conditions and device behaviour with T-Mobile Control Center.
“At Lucid Drone Technologies, we are committed to providing robotic solutions that allow our customers to complete jobs that were once dull, dirty, and dangerous in a safer, faster, and smarter way,” said Andrew Ashur, CEO, Lucid Drone Technologies. “T-Mobile not only allows us to provide our customers with the highest quality of real-time support and connectivity today, but they also have impressive 5G capabilities that allow us to push the frontier limits of responsible robotics."
Initially, T-Mobile for Business will deliver 4G LTE connectivity to Lucid Drone Technologies industrial spraying drones, providing a reliable connection nationwide. But in the near future, Lucid Drone Technologies expects to utilise the un-carrier's 5G network, for advanced use cases such as network operations centre access, live streaming video and remote piloting.
“As Americas largest and fastest 5G network, T-Mobile is poised to push IoT to its full potential and catapult adoption — paving the way for new drone applications that rely on low-latency, high-speed data, and real-time location and proximity-based services,” said Callie Field, President, T-Mobile Business Group.
“Lucid Drone Technologies is a great example of a customer using originality and new technology to solve complicated problems. It’s not very often that you get to collaborate with these kinds of thinkers, and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to offer our technology to help bring their vision to life.”