For several years, I've watched the development of drone technology. For a while, I thought that planting "trees" by drone might eventually become feasible, although there were a lot of logistical challenges to overcome. For instance, a drone can't plant trees, but it could drop seeds.
My two biggest perceived challenges with drone planting/seeding are:
1. Supply chain shortages of available seed. Seed quantities are limited in Canada, and if a drone needs to disperse multiple seeds in order to germinate one tree, that's a lot of wasted seed.
2. Gravity. The biggest effective constraint on drone operations is flight time and battery costs. Why fight against gravity? In my mind, that's a lot of wasted energy. Perhaps a better solution is the use of robots, which would require much more processor power and advanced electronics and skeleton, but which wouldn't be wasting energy trying to stay aloft. But that's a discussion for another post.
One area that I think holds a lot more promise is the use of drones for delivering boxes of seedlings to difficult-to-reach areas.
To be clear, I think that delivering boxes of seedlings by drone is a really small niche opportunity. ATV's are obviously the best option for delivering trees, in terms of pure economics. There are safety costs, and mechanical costs, and there is some terrain that is not accessible by ATV. But generally, tree delivery by ATV is a great choice on most projects where you don't have truck-to-edge access.
I also use helicopters constantly, and I like helicopters. Helicopters can deliver large numbers of seedlings very efficiently. Helicopters are great for moving trees into areas that ATV's can't reach. Of course, a drawback is that helicopters are very expensive. A good medium such as an A-Star or a 407 is probably around three thousand dollars per hour, depending on the exact machine/company/location and whether that's a wet or dry rate. Many companies also have a four-hour minimum rule on billing (unless you're a regular client), which means that you want to use the machine for more than four hours per day or else your per-hour costs suddenly start to skyrocket artificially. So if you're going to bring in a helicopter, you need to be mentally prepared to sign invoices for at least twelve thousand dollars per day, and sometimes double that.
Drones that can move tree boxes are not cheap, and the cost of the drone airframe is a fraction of overall operating costs. You can pretty quickly get into a six-figure cost for a robust industrial drone setup for tree delivery. So you'd need to move a lot of boxes with that drone in order to justify the costs. Using very rough numbers, if a drone system costs $100,000 then you need to figure out "how many boxes can I move with a helicopter for $100,000?" Let's say that you have thirty hours of heli time for that price, and the machine can move at least 200 boxes per hour to the block (depending on distance, sling size, box weight, etc.). That means that your drone system would have to be able to move six thousand boxes to be competitive with helicopter pricing. And that's just not happening with a drone. Helicopters are better.
Back to the niche opportunity for drone delivery: What is the niche? Well, you need to think about blocks where an ATV simply can't move the trees (perhaps there's a river in the way, or the block is full of muskeg). And on top of that, the block would need to be small enough that a helicopter isn't efficient. You wouldn't want to pay for four hours of flight time to bring a helicopter into a block, just to fly 18 boxes and then go home. And voila, that's where the opportunity for drone delivery might come into play.
I was thinking about all of this a few days ago. I decided to throw a query at ChatGPT (on medium effort) to try to learn more about the issues involved. I told Chat that I wanted to know what drone systems currently exist that would be capable of delivering boxes of trees, and their costs. I gave it a few parameters, such as the typical range of average box weights (thirty to fifty pounds), the hypothetical distance from roadside to drop-off point (I said that 500m might be common, but to also think about longer flights such as 1200m). I mentioned elevation gain (no more than 150m across the 500m horizontal distance) and the fact that there would be cargo going out, but the drone wouldn't have to carry anything when returning to the home point.
Once I got an answer to the query above, I fed that answer back into Chat on the Pro heavy-thinking setting, and asked it to fully analyze the feasibility of delivering boxes by drone using the systems that Chat itself had suggested to me. I told it that I wanted a full research report with budgeting, no more than sixty pages in length. I came back a while later, and Chat had produced this spreadsheet and this PDF research report for me: (click to download)
www.replant.ca/docs/Drones_-_Seedling_Drone_Operational_Financial_Model.xlsx
www.replant.ca/docs/Drones_-_Heavy_Lift_Seedling_Delivery_Feasibility_Report.pdf
The spreadsheet has a lot of weaknesses. I was both impressed by it, and simultaneously not impressed. The level of depth is interesting. However, some of the numbers don't make a lot of sense. Compared to watching Chat version 4 struggling with spreadsheets 18 months ago, the current models are at least 100x more capable now. But they still have a way to go. I think by the time a Chat 7.0 is released (if such a model is shared with the public) then we'd see a fully polished and accurate spreadsheet.
The PDF report is better. It still has weaknesses. For example, to touch on a very minor flaw, it made reference to "the existing Honda generator." That makes no sense for most people. But Chat remembers that I own a Honda EB10000C generator on the east coast, and assumed that the reader of the report would have access to that. And to touch on a very major flaw, Chat assumed that I was trying to replace ATV's with drones, and recognized that this was not economically feasible. It didn't realize that I was questioning whether drone delivery could be an effective complement to ATV delivery in a limited number of certain special cases.
Overall, the biggest value in this exercise, for me, was that the Feasibility Report gave me a lot of food for thought. It has errors, but it has a lot of material that made me consider a lot of other questions. The report was enough to kick-start my quest to learn whether drones might really work for delivering boxes in the future.
Six months from now, maybe I'll know enough to be able to write a proper prompt to give me a much better document outlining the current capabilities of drones in tree planting. And by then, the AI models will also be a lot smarter and give better information.
