“We’ve been talking to people in agriculture, public safety, you name the market segment, and what is clear is that they really want a helicopter… but with the usability and economics of a drone,” says SiFly chief business officer Logan Jones.
And Santa Clara, CA-based SiFly—which has just emerged from stealth with drones its claims to fly faster, further, for longer, than anything else on the market—can deliver on that promise, he claims.
When it comes to ag spray drones, a market currently dominated by Chinese supplier DJI, the major barriers to adoption are cost and productivity, says Jones, who spent 13 years at Boeing. “The more time you’re in the air, the more productive you are. It’s a dollars and cents game. You can have the nicest, most whiz-bang piece of technology, but if it’s more expensive, you’re going to lose.”
According to Jones, “There are a couple benefits of our configuration that play out very strongly within agriculture. First, customers want removable batteries that last because they are the number one driver of cost. Second, we fly at roughly 2x the speed of other systems. So we’re more productive, and we can cover more ground.”
Meanwhile, SiFly’s boom design, which deploys hydraulic nozzles and laminar flow rather than rotary atomizers, enables a higher degree of precision while spraying, he claims. In simple terms, says Jones, if you match the speed that you’re pushing crop inputs out from the boom with the forward air speed, “you don’t get a bunch of drift.”
He adds: “That quality of laydown and the ability to vary it, is going to be a game changer in agriculture. We really view our competition as helicopters or ground rigs.”
‘We’re very efficient in how we produce lift’
Right now, SiFly has two models: The Q12, which in agriculture would be relevant for mapping, and the larger Q250, which is suitable for spraying. The latter has a capacity of 30 gallons, more than double that of market leader DJI’s core ag spraying models.
But two core principles underscore both models, says Jones. “The first is around how you manage energy. If you look at nearly every other multi-rotor [drone] out there, when they take off, 30-35% of their weight is their battery. Ideally, that percentage is 66%, and we’re about 60-62%, which means we have twice the available energy on every flight to convert to endurance.”
He adds: “We’re very efficient in how we produce lift. We have a low disc loading design [whereby the drone’s weight is spread over a big propeller area], which means we can use really energy dense cells [that hold a lot of energy for their size] rather than high power cells. And that has the benefit of really long life and a really favorable cost structure.”
The second core principle is around forward flight, where the key metric is the lift-over-drag (L-over-D) ratio, he says. This measures how much upward force (lift) an aircraft gets compared to the air resistance (drag) it faces. The higher the number, the more efficient the aircraft.
“If you look at helicopters,” says Jones, “they’re around 4, or 4.5 L over D. Whereas multi-rotors [drones] are 1.2, or 1.5, which is really bad. What we’ve done is bring that L over D much closer to what a helicopter would be, so somewhere around 4. So that’s by looking at things like the struts that go from the body to the motors, airfoils [propeller blades] that cut through the air really nicely, and offsetting rotors, so the drone’s natural position is to fly forward.
“We also have flatter blades like a helicopter. It’s about adding layers and layers of optimization.”
“If you look at the helicopter mission data,, the top end of those missions is about two hours. And the limitation is fuel and human fatigue. Our whole design thesis was if we could exceed two hours on an individual charge, then all of a sudden we’re relevant for maybe 70% of the helicopter missions around data collection. And over time, as we scale up, we will be directly competitive with light helicopters.” Logan Jones, SiFly
Torque rotor design
Finally, he says, SiFly has patents around technology that it can “scale up into much larger systems that rival light helicopters. That is a very nice spot for the agriculture market.”
He explains: “The way that multi rotors produce lift today is through something called RPM [rotations per minute] control, whereby each independent rotor speeds up or slows down almost instantly to produce stability and to produce lift.”
If a drone is very light, he says, achieving lift via RPM control is not that difficult. But if you have to lift something much heavier, “there’s inertia and momentum.” To counter this, SiFly has patented something called torque rotor design that changes the pitch of the blade based on how much twisting force it needs to produce instant lift rather than using fixed-pitch blades that control lift by changing rotor speed (RPM).
From a cost standpoint, he says, “We haven’t set pricing [for the Q250 model] yet, but we aim to be somewhere between the top end of the DJI market and what you see from the other Western suppliers, so we’d be talking about below $100k probably.”
SiFly’s initial focus is on its smaller Q12 drones, which will be in production by the end of this year or early next, says Jones. “For the Q250, we should have a flying prototype next year.”
China
SiFly makes its own batteries and is compliant with the strictures of the recent defense spending bill (NDAA), which proposes restrictions on certain communications components coming out of China (read more here).
According to Jones: “I’m pretty confident that over time, a lot of the consumer electronic supply chain moves out of China, but right now, I would say that nearly every system on the market has exposure to Chinese sub components. We try to have dual suppliers, but this is less about compliance issues than mitigating supply chain risk.”
A ‘game changer for agronomy’
Antony Yousefian, partner at VC firm The First Thirty, which has invested in SiFly along with Qudit, told AgFunderNews that its investment was “primarily driven by SiFly’s potential to disrupt traditional agricultural practices.”
He added: “We have been exploring technologies that enable precision agriculture for some time. However, the economic viability of many solutions, particularly in areas like spraying, has been a barrier due to high costs or only marginal improvements over conventional methods like tractor usage.
“SiFly offers a compelling solution with the potential to significantly reduce implementation costs, challenging the necessity of traditional tractor use. Its Q250 will be a game-changer for agronomy.”
SiFly has “stayed in stealth mode for so long because we’re very aware that the perception of this industry is that it’s commoditized,” says Jones. “We wanted to demonstrate that we are different, and one example of this is the Uncrewed Triple Challenge in Michigan [a state-sponsored competition of autonomous drones across water, air and land]. We ended up setting a world record.”
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