Aerial Industries - Recyclable Flying Knapsack

Drone sales today are roughly estimated at 17 million across the globe and anticipated to grow exponentially over the next decade with many more appearing in the agric space within rural communities where we operate. Just like most electronics after service-life, there is no standardized disposal method minimizing waste or repurposing parts and components such as the (reinforced carbon fibre) airframes, micro-controller, battery power pack(s), motors, propellers and so forth.

We are taking a design-stage focus on circular economy in our manufacturing for after service-life teardown and repurposing of piece parts long before build-and-deployment of our drones into the market.

In our development construct, we are concentrating on an intelligent iterative process with reusable parts and local materials like bamboo for recycling after service.

Africa spends US $90 billion on health cost directly related to agrochemicals.

71% of all child labor is in agriculture. 80% of the adult working population on farms in Africa are the women, many breastfeeding mothers exposed to agrochemicals with the future risk of long-term illnesses from skin to respiratory complications.

Unfortunately, the continent is challenged with multiple issues ranging from desertification to intensive farming practices causing soil nutrient depletion.  Therefore for it to continue to feed itself many areas need the soil and crop enhancers, protectants and stimulants but the process needs to be automated to avoid other health costs.

Can drones help in farmers' behavioural change in more extensive farming methods? Can drones provide the zero contact to the high concentrations during dispersals? While the answers may be "Yes!", there is no standardized disposal method minimizing waste or repurposing of parts and components after the service-life of these equipments.

Let me tell you about Cy, one of our beta clients. Cy had been farming pretty much all his life. When he started, it was just him, his wife and his two sons. His sons are grown now and care little about agriculture. So, they left for the city life. 

Every year once the first rain has fallen Cy goes out, clears the field, plants the crops then spends the next 96 to 110 days nurturing to harvest – a daunting task for an aging man and his wife.

In, 2016 Cy solicited our services. For the first time through the season Cy and his wife did not visit the hospital ill due to chemical exposure. He learnt more about his farm and at harvest Cy made 40% increase while spending 11% less on agro-inputs.

There are over 21 million other smallholder farmers like Cy in Nigeria alone and 586 million across emerging economies of Africa, South America and Asia farming communities

There are a number of bamboo species grown in most of our targetted  developing countries of operation. From our preliminary studies on the material science and specific strength properties of these species, we have conducted comprehensive load tests and virtual simulations with support from Autodesk Singapore. We continue our testing process for final selection with decent competitive edge over the current use of reinforced fibre composites and aluminium alloys.  

Generative material optimisation for our drones (with given constraints) helps in an organic design process that customises either a batch, series or individual drone build.  Our virtual digital twin development process eliminates almost all R&D and positions our business in a lean yet versatile production platform. This once complex and single product line field of drone manufacturing now implements unsupervised neural network models that have self-organising hyper parametric tuning embedded to generate multitude of structurally sound and individual configurations to choose from.   

The successful deployment of our recyclable drones is that we are creating sustainable jobs of youths like Cy's sons while safeguarding the air, waterways of communities and homes in farming areas and reducing the amount of chemicals used on the farms and in effect, our environment as well. 

In the long run, automation will also reduce field menial labor, and we gather more data insight on local farm crop yield and performance all for a sustainable future.

Imagine using image-based artificial intelligence to pre-select your raw materials, in our case it is the bamboo grown in the farm field.  To generatively design the aerial robotic vehicle, the original data is trained using simple 'query-by-example' algorithms with embedded constraints on the expected payload, vibration, flutter, dynamic force loads within the flight envelop, the expected operation, lifecycle etc. 

Our recyclable bamboo drones are designed with affordability in mind through a continuous iterative process that not only makes each build exciting and new but because of the lifecycle tradeoff, in a minimalistic way we remove proliferated features in today's drone builds in the name of redundancy.

Sustainable job creation by the shortened operational life of our 'cheap' drones also helps in expediting skillsets and the needed local human capital with expertise in drone maintenance and manufacturing in such communities with unemployed young minds. 

The drone frame is not all that makes up a drone however, all our software development is readily based on open-source applications.  Only limited amount of in-house development is considered for security, safety-in-communication purposes. 

Our circular economy construct follows after the service life-cycle of the bamboo-drone structure, all accessories such as the props, IMU, motherboard, battery et.c are removed and reused on another drone, while the bamboo frame itself is recycled for other use in the community including cooking, and/ building local structures as the need calls for.  

Our softwares tech stack is bifurcated into a ROS dev and a PX4 dev depending on the drone configuration our unsupervised discriminator generates.

However, out of sixteen (16) bamboo species so far our drone structures will focus on four species mostly available in South East Asia, Africa and South America for training a model through generative design and manufacturing algorithms to help provide the optimised airframe.  

The drone has a base-concept from which all configuration are derived. At Aerial Industries Pte Ltd., we are tasking our algorithms to evaluate our bamboo raw material even before initial purchase/ harvesting using computer vision technology. This should ultimately reduce waste in raw materials 

Subsequently, as stated previously, at end-of-life of the drone components and accessories are removed, repaired/ overhauled if necessary and re-purposed while the biodegradable structural airframe is made available for other industries. 

Reinforced Fibre Carbon Composite (RFC) structures are the industry's go-to solution today but they are expensive to manufacture through lay-up processes/ fusion etc.  More disconcerting is that they are non-recyclable or degradable after use.

Bamboo is anisotropic and heterogeneous of a lignin matrix reinforced fiber composition that may still not be conducive for all manner of drone performance and aerial work but for open field agriculture and agriculture's need for alleviating field labor where tractors and other heavy machineries cannot meet the feasible economic cost and service demand, bamboo drones may be the answer.

We can turn the so-called elite drone-technology into a staple mass use for arable farm work as well as other fields of mining and exploration, independent search and rescue purposes and so forth.  

At Aerial Industries, we believe in the longer term community behavioural change that can lead to the needed economical transformation.  As a company, we are well positioned to pioneer this opportunity for farming communities.  It's our mission to build up the human capital, skillsets and empower the youths in these mostly low income agriculture community economies in South East Asia, Africa and South America.

2016 (Early proof of concept) - Four (4) Farms

2017 and 2018 - Fifteen (15) farms with 280 signed up

2019 to 2020 - 9,000 farms

2022 - Target is 61,000 hectares of arable farms

We desire competition in this space but it is non-existent at the moment.  To help propel this, within the next 12-18 months we wish to make our software stack open-sourced and BSD or CERN licensed as deemed necessary. Healthy competition is necessary to grow the eco-system (simultaneously) across continents.  

We want to be in the frontlines driving this change by completing our analysis on the bamboo species, completing our algorithms for both the reinforced machine learning bamboo selection process and generative unsupervised organic design protocol for the drone airframe structure and systems architecture(s).

Finally we hope to tailor our turn-key franchise solution that should work in most of the economies like Peru, Nigeria, Senegal, Malaysia and Indonesia (with our slight incentive-oriented tweaks). Our KPIs may focus on crop yields, general health and so forth however, our most important assessment is in the 'changing youths' within these communities and their new-found perspectives on agriculture as a profession; boosting livelihood and bonding families together one farmland at a time.

I believe our goal for 21 million in Nigeria and over 500 million farmers across a couple of continents will be accomplished ...one day, one household, one farmland and one community at a time.   

Taking advantage of the enormous opportunities in today's worldwide internet and communication technology, we hope to steer the agriculture eco into a warm embrace of the use of oversized agriculture industrial drones.  Within the next few years agro-drones should be used for more than terrestrial vegetative analytics or 25kg payload regulatory compliant systems but flying tractors with relevant aerial right-of-way exemptions and other (politics-incumbency) alternative means of compliance and policies to propel the agri-food industry into a global surplus.

Even though drones continue to drastically drop in prices over the last 10 years and open sources make the technology accessible to all, skeptics still feel the technology is not viable in Africa's agriculture sector.  This makes investment opportunities scarce.  

Educating and training local talent with top-notch available tech to builds a better argument for investment in the region  but also provides sustainability in our (future) human capital for maintenance, service and operation skills purposes.

Most policies in the field, as with most (aviation) compliance laws will be shaped by the public's demand not government officials as we mostly assume.  As a company-focused on serving the rural communities in remote and scarcely supported regions, Aerial Industries believes that based on its first-mover trusted relationships with these community farmers enough public support will help in shaping the currently non-existent regulations forming a higher barrier to entry for copy-cats and future competition unless they exhibit similar care for the communities 

Currently, we are ramping up our engineering talents and sourcing partnerships in south East Asia.

We recently secured grants from Expo Dubai 2020 and successfully opened our engineering office in Singapore to take advance of the pool of engineering talent and to expand our funding access.

Additionally, with support from Singapore Ministry of Manpower, Ashinaga Foundation, Japan as well as funds from the Tony Elumelu Foundation, Airbus Hamburg, we are positioning ourselves to grow a more secured human capital base with access to train locals and utilise some of the most advanced tech in our development but in an affordable way.

Not applicable

Full time staff - three (3)

Part time - eight (8)

Contractors - 20 - 36

Over 32 years of combined aerospace and aeronautical engineering academic and professional experience.

Over 14 years of agriculture and agronomy insight in Africa business sector with extension work in South America and South East Asia

Our international exposure as a team offers us a broad network of support and mentorship to develop and overcome the expected challenges in new territories of innovation.

Most importantly, we are always learning and applying what we've learnt.

Airbus Aerospace, Hamburg Germany

General Electric (GE) Lagos Nigeria

Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) Lagos, Nigeria

ExpoLive/ Expo Dubai 2020, Dubai

IE Business School, Africa Center, Spain

Entrepreneur First Singapore

While we have access to over 300 agrochemical suppliers and a long standing relationship with the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), we are focused on community leaders and local heads whose support and trust provides us much more fluid relationship building with our customers

We have a turn-key franchise model. With a 5-part video series, I have tried to breakdown our hybrid operational approach.  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...

In summary, in each community we develop relationships differently based on immediate needs they have. Working planning is making each franchise a sustainable silo with general supervision from our control center in Lagos 

In each of these silos, we empower the mothers and youths with the tech.  The leaders of the community are incentivised by our early investment of time, labour and in some cases funds into their farm.

The trust we build with these locals is paramount and also the most vital thing to lead to sustainability.

1.  Building a hybrid franchising model that is tailored specific to the individual regions is our core mission in creating a platform for speedier adaptability.  

2.  The shared liability with the locals empowers the people while alleviating our high risk allocation accrued to niche/ new technologies. 

3.  A variable incentive framework in the franchise arrangement also provides a shared effort to grow the company amidst low technology penetration and skills required.  

4. Penetration itself will be encouraged through campaigns and local competitions (with varied awards). 

5.  Expanding our reach into other industries such as transportation (logistics), mining, exploration, search and rescue and so forth with this burgeoning technology in these emerging economies will foster other revenue sources as well.

6.  Setting up a healthy competitive environment to encourage younger competitors to enter the arena with us. That is why our software technology is sourced from public domain and our hardware may also be under a BSD and CERN license in the future.  

Through MIT Solve's network, Aerial Industries can gain access to technical academic experts to help flesh out the bamboo material optimisation process.

We can also critically look at the market scalability approach and our hybrid 'turn-key' franchise model as a viable business model operating in West Africa and beyond

Finally, MIT Solve has a wide breath of established companies that may see benefit inn partnering with us to help expand their reach in rural Africa where we have deep roots to help propel our businesses jointly. 

MIT Solver is potentially a great global platform to help give the millions of children and pregnant mothers subjected to the exposures of these harsh chemicals every year, a voice where they have no voice.

As a larger community we can help invoke change and help better their lives and the lives in their community by giving them a platform 'one farmland at a time'.

Corteva/ Syngenta/ Bayer - an agro-input supplier to consider more eco-friendly aerial dispersal using our tech

DJI/ XAG - An aerial robotics mass manufacturer to consider outsourcing  assembling of some of our components and perhaps partnerships 

African Development Bank/ Federal Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development/ Ministry for Industry Trade and Investment - Organisation to help craft policies and implement regulatory guideline to ensure proper use of our technology supported by funding and the needed public education

MIT - Academic institutional support and extended partnership for further research findings

UNICEF/ World Food Programme/ Food and Agric Org./ Gates Foundation - Impact organisations that can help scale application of both the technology and 'modifiable' business model to other emerging economies across the globe

BUHLER/ John Deere/ Caterpillar - Heavy machinery makers to partner as part of the larger agriculture ecosystem producing equipments with commonality for ease in maintenance and repair needs.

A.I. will help is in terrestrial vegetative analytics through on-time image processing whereby the only the exact amount of agro-input is disperse on a farm in realtime as the plant distress is detected.  Thereby protecting our breathable air, water ways and homes nearby.

Much earlier in our work, the preselection process of raw materials harvested for our drone assembly is done with the help of computer vision and AI.

Every time our drone is up in the air it (potentially) can be gathering data and learning about the  each farm that produces food for the masses.  This 'shadowing' over farms is vital in predicting food supplies in the near future.

With A.I. implementation early we can start learning the right and wrong behaviours that can continuously lead to increased crop yield to better inform the farmers.  

ATTRACT YOUTHS TO AGRICULTURE CAREERS (with tech): Making agriculture attractive for the youths in rural farming communities will help reduce the number of youths fleeing their communities for the urban cities.  It will help the currently ageing population of growers to pass on their knowledge to the youthful workforce needed to guarantee food supply for the future.  

 Youth training will be in build local drones with numerous incentives for healthy competition within community settings, education, public exposure and so forth

EMPOWER MORE RURAL WOMEN (with tech):  Since 80% of the farm workers in Africa today are women, we intend to train more women to become drone pilots and operators.  This way, they are protecting themselves and in some cases their unborn child from exposure to high concentrations of substances we are not sure of their long-term effects.

Women spend most of their day carrying their child on their backs under the hot sun and working the field while careering to their other toddlers running around her dangerous work environment.  By deploying drones under a small shed by the farm while she cares for her young, a woman can be more efficient and safe.  Also with our technology she finishes her day's menial work in much short amount of time having ample time to take care of her home front.

When our drones get deployed in Canada and North America, just like in Africa to expedite the farming process and reduce the adverse effects of agrochemicals (needed on farms), we hope to ensure not only do we build analytical data and learn about the complex life cycles and the numerous effects on a farm-to-farm basis.  However, security and safety will be enhanced using advanced geo-fencing and encrypted communication technology to avoid interception that might lead to hackers misuse of the system.

We hope this is foundational in our development and deployment of our technology in both emerging and advanced economies alike for the future of food supply to humanity.