Drone pest control | RNZ

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A ghostly gray image appeared on the laptop screen. “Do you see these deer?” Jordan Munn asked, pointing to a corner of the screen where a pair of animals were highlighted in bright white.

“I had a hunter target these deer. He actually just shot this deer, this deer was on the right side, and it was going to go down,” he said.

The gorgeous figure of the first deer fell to the ground, followed closely by the second one.

Hunting with high temperatures

Jordan is a professional hunter who owns a business called Trap and Trigger in Upper Hutt. The company has contracts with several local councils to remove everything from deer to wallabies to wild pines.

Jordan said there is a new technology that is revolutionizing the industry – small commercial drones (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones as they are commonly known.

“We’re becoming more and more reliant on them,” Jordan said. “The pest control industry has changed amazingly in the last decade. Ten years ago, drones basically didn’t exist.”

When infrared cameras are mounted on drones, their thermal vision makes warm-blooded deer, wallabies and other mammalian pest species stand out — even when these animals are largely obscured by bush.

Jordan said that a decade ago, even a thermal imaging camera or scope was beyond the budget of most commercial hunters. But costs have dropped dramatically over the past few decades and are still falling.

“Within a few years, every contractor will have a handheld thermal imager, a thermal imaging scope and a thermal imaging drone. If you don’t have one or all of them, you’re behind,” Jordan said.

It all seems pretty sci-fi, and Jordan speculates that it might be possible to use drone technology to eliminate hunter involvement altogether.

“We haven’t put guns on drones yet,” Jordan said. “But if we could legally and safely use guns on drones … that would work. It would work really well. But there are some issues, both social and legal, to get to that point.”

While weaponized drones are unlikely to arrive in New Zealand anytime soon, the Otago District Council is already trialing the use of fully autonomous drones to exterminate different types of pests.

Tree Buster

Gavin Uddy is a project delivery specialist in the Otago Regional Council’s environment implementation team. One of his main projects is testing whether drones can hunt and eliminate wild pine trees on their own.

“The drones go out and search the predetermined area and fly over the area looking for wild conifers.”

Wild conifers and invasive pines threaten to choke out large swathes of the South Island’s upland landscape.

Gavin said the drone uses artificial BroadCast Unitedligence (AI) image detection technology that has been trained on various tree images to enable it to identify wild conifers on its own. But it doesn’t stop there.

“It can then use GPS to locate the tree. It can take a picture of the tree and estimate the size of the tree based on the height of the tree and the diameter of all the leaves. All of this information is collated after the survey flight is completed.”

At this point, the data is checked by a human operator, and then passed on to a second, larger drone loaded with herbicide.

“The drone can then fly the most efficient flight path that has been analyzed and spray all the trees, putting just the right amount of herbicide on the tree — enough to kill it.”

Gavin said they won’t know how well the autonomous pine eradication trial worked until late 2024, but some scientists are enthusiastic about the technology’s potential for pest control.

Flying tractor

Dr Justin Nairn, head of the Physics and Chemistry of Plant Protection team at the Royal Research Institution Scion, has high hopes for drones to be used in pest control.

“They can fly lower and slower, closer to their target,” Justin explains. “Drones have greater precision and can spray pesticides more accurately than helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft, which usually have to fly faster and farther from their target.”

Justin is currently conducting experiments to investigate how drones can be used to spray pesticides and other control agents to combat biosecurity breaches. He says the technology is particularly promising in urban areas.

“We’ve sprayed the whole city in the past, but there’s always a lot of resistance… people won’t believe it,” he said.

Drones, on the other hand, are more precise and can target specific areas or even specific types of plants where invasive pests are suspected to be hiding.

Justin said that in the near future, emerging high-tech batteries will make drones increasingly competitive with helicopters and other aircraft.

“We predict that these technologies will largely eliminate flight time limitations. And then when you start to scale up, you’ll basically have a flying tractor. You can put any equipment and tools and whatever you want on it,” Justin explained.

“I think it’s going to revolutionize the underlying industry, honestly.”

Listen to the audio to find out more about how drones are currently being used for pest control in New Zealand.

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