Hylio

Hylio is a technology company making drones for aerial crop spraying that is headquartered in Houston, Texas that was founded in 2015 by Arthur Erickson, Mike Oda, and Nikhil Dixit. The company is making drones for precision agriculture designed to save farmers time, reduce drift, and improve crop yields.

Introduction to Hylio Agrodrone.

Hylio is offering spraying services for herbicides, fungicides, ripeners, flower inhibitors (and other spraying applications) in the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for the following crops: sugar cane, corn, rice, cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, soy, orka, and more. The company claims that a single Hylio spray team can cover an average of 100-150 acres of crop land a day, and can operate during the day and at night.

Hylio offers its clients the following services to set up and optimize their drones: planing, drone piloting, drone servicing, and analysis. Each customer meets with Hylio to map out their plot of land and schedule drone applications. A team of Hylio drone pilots then use a fleet of Hylio AgroDrones to apply the customers desired products on their crops. Hylio technicians fix and repair any issues associated with AgroDrones during before, during, and after product applications.

AgroDrone's are Hylio's crop spraying drones that have the following features: ability to spray 24 acres per hour, redundant flight systems, IP 55 protection, radio telemetry, 17 litre spraying capacity, and 6 interchangeable spraying nozzles. Each AgroDrone operates at a 12s (44.4V) using two 30 Amp 6S lithium polymer batteries. Each battery weighs 7.9 pounds (3.6 kilograms), and each AgroDrone weighs 33.5 pounds (15.2 kilograms) without batteries.

Image of AgroDrone.

Agrosol is Hylio's mission control software application that gives Hylio the ability to perform the following functions: drone swarm control, intuitive drone planning, obstacle avoidance, radar altimeter, automation, instantaneous drone control, no need for remote controlling of drones, and agflow optimization.

Swarm control allows one Hylio AgroDrone operator to control and ensure the safe operation of multiple drones at once during Hylio AgroDrone spraying applications.

The intuitive planning features of Agrosol allow monitoring and control of the entire spraying application process through loading pre-existing map files, generating autonomous missions, and tracking all lot applications with database tools.

Obstacle avoidance is achieved by combining sensors on AgroDrones with algorithms that allows the drones to adapt to their environment in real-time and avoid obstacles such as trees, power lines, fences, or other obstacles.

The radar altimeter allows each AgroDrone to precisely determine its altitude above the crop field and use that information to minimize drift and maximize the quality of spraying applications.

Agrosol gives AgroDrones the ability to automatically take off, remain stable during flight, perform spraying applications, and return when their tanks are empty or they need to be serviced.

Every deployed AgroDrone can be monitored and manually controlled at any time using AgroSol. Agrosol allows drone operators to pause the activity of any AgroDrone, move drones to specific locations, land drones anywhere, or make them return to home (RTH).

Agrosol allows each Agrodrone to fly independently without a risk of drones crashing into one another while being in control from one central device instead of a single device controlling each Agrodrone. This feature allows drone operators to manage several AgroDrones at the same time during the spraying process.

The agflow optimization features of Agrosol allow farmers to automatically control the flow of spraying applications to precisely manage how many gallons of spraying they are doing per acre of crop.

On February 28, 2019 Hylio completed their pre-seed funding round with an undisclosed amount of funding from undisclosed investors.