High above the fields of the Midwest, the UIUC-TUM Solar Flyer soars, providing the capability for all-day agricultural surveys. The optimized 13-foot wingspan aircraft is powered by state-of-the-art solar arrays and high-density batteries to enable visually-intensive tasks such as crop pathogen detection. Over the past two years, the aircraft performed multiple 8+ hour flights covering 400-500 acres per hour in survey-like flight paths with power to spare for onboard computation. Not only were these flights performed under environmentally challenging, cloudy and windy conditions, but they were also done under waning solar availability in late August and early September. Therefore, the implication is twofold: the aircraft has the capability to (1) collect crop data under real-world flight conditions - conditions impossible for multi-rotor drones - and (2) do so for the majority of the growing season from March to September.
