Introduces Sensors Powered By DJI SkyPort

MicaSense releases Altum, its new top of the line sensor for professional-grade agricultural drone mapping. Altum captures synchronized multispectral and thermal imagery, enabling aligned outputs for advanced analytics.

Altum’s multispectral imagers are the highest resolution integrated multispectral solution available for drones, allowing for detailed RGB outputs and advanced crop classifications. Whereas before they had to fly multiple flights with multiple sensors, researchers, growers, and service providers can now capture data for plant health, water stress mapping, phenotyping and more in one flight, with one sensor. The ideal sensor for enterprise and academic researchers, Altum provides the daily usability and reliability users have come to expect from MicaSense.

"The Altum design resulted from experience developing advanced analytics and understanding needs for advanced research," said Justin McAllister, CTO and Co-founder of MicaSense. "We realized the market is limited by time and cost constraints of owning multiple sensors and flying multiple passes over the same field. The goal of Altum is to simplify the workflow, and with synchronized capture, to provide results that can be correlated and quantified more easily."

Altum includes MicaSense’s standard five-band configuration of multispectral bands (red, green, blue, near-infrared and red-edge) and an integrated Lepton® radiometric thermal longwave infrared sensor from FLIR Systems, providing temperature measurement for every pixel of the scene for additional crop data and optimization. Expandable high-capacity USB 3.0 storage allows users to fly longer and cover more area without landing to swap storage. In addition, advancements in image capture rate enables faster flight speeds.

Users can process Altum data with industry standard software like Agisoft and Pix4Dmapper to generate an aligned, radiometrically calibrated six band (R,G,B,RE,NIR,T) geotiff, or access the raw data from Altum to process data themselves.

Included with Altum is DLS 2, the patent-pending next generation of the MicaSense Downwelling Light Sensor (DLS). DLS 2 allows for a more streamlined integration as it combines both the DLS and GPS into one product. In addition, through proprietary MicaSense technology, the DLS 2 will offer significantly better calibration for changing light conditions and better measurements over time.

(Source: MicaSense news release)

FMI: www.micasense.com/dji-skyport