One of the most important elements of a successful Taranis service is the timing of our flights. If flights are taking place too early, the imagery outputs will not provide the required data and will limit the ability to deliver meaningful insights. If flights are taking place too late, the ability to act upon the delivered information and insights will be time-limited.
Taranis developed a comprehensive technology, named Intelligent Flight Scheduler 2.0 (or IFS 2.0), geared to improve our serviceability by arriving at the field at the right time from an agronomic perspective. The IFS 2.0 implementation considers many factors and use cases, and provides a unified model which reliably schedules Taranis flights.
The technology is providing accurate flight scheduling for several crop types, including Soybean, Corn and Cotton, as well as many other crops that are being serviced.
To perform the most accurate scheduling decisions, IFS 2.0 is utilizing a proven stage growth model, provided by ClearAG by DTN: https://www.dtn.com/agriculture/agribusiness/clearag/
Utilizing the stage growth model, the Taranis team, including Customer Success, Product Management and Agronomy staff, defined the best timing for each flight, and according to this logic flights are scheduled.
The following rules and guidelines were implemented as part of the IFS 2.0 development.
If the field already has an active flight, IFS 2.0 will wait at least until images are taken at the field prior to generating the next flight mission. The goal is to avoid scenarios in which we have two flight missions very close to each other, as the second flight will not provide meaningful and additional useful information.
During our scheduling logic, IFS 20 retrieves all fields associated with active plans. During this retrieval, fields with active flights are filter out, ensuring these fields are not even considered by our scheduling algorithm.
IFS 2.0 will not allow for late passes flights to be performed less than 5 days apart, even if possible by the crop stages forecast. It will also help prevent redundant information.
IFS 2.0 will not schedule flights for fields which do not have information about the crop in the field. The goal is to avoid flying unseeded fields.
In most cases, the planting date information is crucial for calculating and creating the flights. This is currently the case for all Corn, Soybean and Cotton fields that are part of our full-service plans. Without the planting date, IFS 2.0 cannot accurately predict the best time to fly those fields, and will wait with any flight scheduling until the information is provided.
IFS 2.0 provides at least 3 days of flight window for late passes flights to allow our pilots to perform the flight missions. IFS 2.0 aims to provide flight windows as large as possible and up to 21 days, to allow for flexibility and enhance our operations performance.
In the rare cases where there isn’t sufficient time to satisfy all the requirements above, IFS 2.0 will not schedule a specific flight mission, and will wait for the scheduler to schedule the next one.
As with all stage growth models, the ability to predict and forecast future conditions is limited. For example, the model could have predicted that the Corn at a specific field would arrive at V1 at the beginning of May, however a cold wave hit the area and it was delayed by a week. Similarly and on the opposite scale, the model could have predicted V3 will be by the end of May, however the weather was warmer than expected and by the scheduled flight time the crop is already in the late stages of V4.
To try to mitigate the risks of unpredictable weather, IFS 2.0 has a set rule to not schedule the beginning of a flight window more than 10 days into the future. IFS 2.0 will use more than 10 days to understand when the flight window should end, but no less for the beginning.
The mitigation can create cases where there will be no active flight mission for some fields. For example, if the 3rd flight for a Soybean field should be performed only between V9 and R1, and currently the forecast is predicting the field will arrive at V9 in 13 days, IFS 2.0 will not schedule the flight yet. The scheduling of the flight will be delayed for 3 more days, until the start of V9 is only 10 days in the future, and only then create the flight mission.
Below you can find a detailed description of the rules for each type of crop and operation mode.
We are using relative maturity of Corn, Soybean and Cotton to make the IFS 2.0 model more accurate in relation to the timing of the flights throughout the season.
The model will get the maturity for the crop, set up by the user through crop variety for the field cycle.
Taranis will complete flights based on the subscribed plan. There are specific scenarios where a smaller number of flights will be performed, for example:
The required information for flights has not been provided in time
Weather conditions or other unforeseen circumstances have not enabled safe flying
In these unusual cases, IFS 2.0 will create an alternative scheduling strategy, separating the actual pass number (flight number) from the logical pass number:
Pass number: the actual flights performed in the field, starting from 1 and increasing by 1 with every flight
Logical pass number: the number representing the rules behind the scheduling of the flight.
Let's look at details of flights for specific crops and their stages.
A: No flights scheduled could occur due to several reasons and please review the rules section to see if one of them applies to your situation. In summary, reasons include:
The previous flight for the field in question is still in progress
Crop type was not provided
Planting date was not provided, but is required for that specific crop
It is still too early to schedule your next flight
The field has reached the max amount of flights included in its plan. Contact your customer success or sales representative to upgrade your plan
A: There are two main reasons responsible for the above scenario:
Weather conditions or other unexpected circumstances prevented our pilots from arriving at the desired flight window
To schedule our flights at the correct time, IFS 2.0 uses a future forecast of the field’s crop stages. It may be that the weather was different than expected (hotter or colder), which resulted in the crop maturing faster than the forecast predicted. We try our best to prevent this from happening by limiting our forecast
A: see the details here.