It is now year six since German aviation company Volocopter and agriculture behemoth John Deere promised us the VoloDrone, a crop-spraying unmanned aerial vehicle that was supposed to disrupt the precision agriculture space.

That was in 2019.

Since then the Bruchsal, Baden-Württemberg company has made updates on how the VoloDrone could be applied to other heavy industrial applications like construction – with successful tests held in Germany – but there has been zero radio contact with regards the agriculture part of the VoloDrone deal.

Two years ago, somebody did reach out to John Deere to find out, but they were told there was no news to report.

DJI and XAG’s catalogue of sprayer drones have filled the space, with highly effective agricultural drones that have welcomed with open arms by agricultural stakeholders the world over.

None of these drones though, have come close to the 200kg payload capacity that the VoloDrone promised in 2019. The biggest drone these companies have on offer carries 40litres of chemicals at a time.

Now, though, it seems there is a company arising to fill the void that VoloDrone left.

An American start-up has launched a sprayer drone with a capacity to carry seeds, as well as chemical and other agricultural spray payload as nearly 100 litres heavy.

Guardian Agriculture, founded by former MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) makers Adam Bercu and Charles Guan, is offering a safer precision agriculture alternative – in the form of a large, purpose-built drone that can autonomously deliver 200-pound payloads across farms.

The company’s drones feature an eighteen-foot spray radius, 80-inch rotors, a custom battery pack, and aerospace-grade materials designed to make crop spraying more safe, efficient, and inexpensive for farmers.

The brains behind this machine say they made it as a response to the plight faced by farmers, who every growing season have to deploy thousands of pilots across the country in small planes loaded with hundreds of pounds of pesticides, to fly extremely close to the ground at upward of 140 miles an hour, unloading their cargo onto rows of corn, cotton, and soybeans.

The world of agricultural aviation is as dangerous as it is vital to America’s farms. Unfortunately, fatal crashes are common.

“We’re trying to bring technology to American farms that are hundreds or thousands of acres, where you’re not replacing a human with a hand pump — you’re replacing a John Deere tractor or a helicopter or an airplane,” Bercu says.

“With Guardian, the operator shows up about 30 minutes before they want to spray, they mix the product, path plan the field in our app, and it gives an estimate for how long the job will take,” he says. “With our fast charging, you recharge the aircraft while you fill the tank, and those two operations take about the same amount of time.”

From Battlebots to farmlands

At a young age, Bercu became obsessed with building robots. Growing up in south Florida, he’d attend robotic competitions, build prototypes, and even dumpster dive for particularly hard-to-find components.

At one competition, Bercu met Charles Guan, who would go on to major in mechanical engineering at MIT, and the two robot enthusiasts became lifelong friends.

“When Charles came to MIT, he basically convinced me to move to Cambridge,” Bercu says.

“He said, ‘You need to come up here. I found more people like us. Hackers!’”

Bercu visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, and indeed fell in love with the region’s makerspaces and hacker culture. He moved soon after, and he and Guan began spending free time at spaces including the Artisans Asylum makerspace in Somerville, Massachusetts; MIT’s International Design Center; and the MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) makerspace.

Guan held several leadership positions at MITERS, including facilities manager, treasurer, and president.

“MIT offered enormous latitude to its students to be independent and creative, which was reflected in the degree of autonomy they permit student-run organisations like MITERS to have compared to other top-tier schools,” Guan says.

“It was a key selling point to me when I was touring mechanical engineering labs as a junior in high school. I was well-known in the department circle for being at MITERS all the time, possibly even more than I spent on classes.”

After Guan graduated, he and Bercu started a hardware consulting business and competed in the robot combat show Battlebots. Guan also began working as a design instructor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he taught a section of Course 2.007 that tasked students with building go-karts.

Eventually, Guan and Bercu decided to use their experience to start a drone company.

“Over the course of Battlebots and building go-karts, we knew electric batteries were getting really cheap and electric vehicle supply chains were established,” Bercu explains.

“People were raising money to build eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) vehicles to transport people, but we knew diesel fuel still outperformed batteries over long distances.

“Where electric systems did outperform combustion engines was in areas where you needed peak power for short periods of time. Basically, batteries are awesome when you have a short mission.”

That idea made the founders think crop spraying could be a good early application. Bercu’s family runs an aviation business, and he knew pilots who would spray crops as their second jobs.

“It’s one of those high-paying but very dangerous jobs,” Bercu says.

“Even in the US, we lose between one and two percent of all agriculture pilots each year to fatal accidents. These people are rolling the dice every time they do this: You’re flying six feet off the ground at 140 miles an hour with 800 gallons of pesticide in your tank.”

After cobbling together spare parts from Battlebots and their consulting business, the founders built a 600-pound drone. When they finally got it to fly, they decided the time was right to launch their company, receiving crucial early guidance and their first funding from the MIT-affiliated investment firm the E14 Fund.

The founders spent the next year interviewing crop dusters and farmers. They also started engaging with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“There was no category for anything like this,” Bercu explains.

“With the FAA, we not only got through the approval process, we helped them build the process as we went through it, because we wanted to establish some common-sense standards.”

Guardian custom-built its batteries to optimise throughput and utilisation rate of its drones. Depending on the farm, Bercu says his machines can unload about 1.5 to two tonnes of payload per hour.

Guardian’s drones can also spray more precisely than planes, reducing the environmental impact of pesticides, which often pollute the landscapes and waterways surrounding farms.

“This thing has the precision to spray the ‘Mona Lisa’ on 20 acres, but we’re not leveraging that functionality today,” Bercu says.

“For the operator we want to make it very easy. The goal is to take someone who sprays with a tractor and teach them to spray with a drone in less than a week.”

Scaling for farmers

To date, Guardian Agriculture has built eight of its aircraft, which are actively delivering payloads over California farms in trials with paying customers.

The company is currently ramping up manufacturing in its 60,000-square-foot facility in Massachusetts, and Bercu says Guardian has a backlog of hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of drones.

“Grower demand has been exceptional,” Bercu says.

“We don’t need to educate them on the need for this. They see the big drone with the big tank and they’re in.”

Bercu envisions Guardian’s drones helping with a number of other tasks like ship-to-ship logistics, delivering supplies to offshore oil rigs, mining, and other areas where helicopters and small aircraft are currently flown through difficult terrain.

But for now, the company is focused on starting with agriculture.

“Agriculture is such an important and foundational aspect of our country,” says the company’s chief operating officer, Ashley Ferguson.

“We work with multigenerational farming families, and when we talk to them, it’s clear aerial spray has taken hold in the industry. But there’s a large shortage of pilots, especially for agriculture applications. So, it’s clear there’s a big opportunity.”

Seven years since founding Guardian, Bercu remains grateful that MIT’s community opened its doors for him when he moved to Cambridge.

“Without the MIT community, this company wouldn’t be possible,” he says.

“I was never able to go to college, but I’d love to one day apply to MIT and do my engineering undergrad or go to the Sloan School of Management. I’ll never forget MIT’s openness to me. It’s a place I hold near and dear to my heart.”