Dell Technologies powers AI drone for South African agriculture sector

By Robin-Leigh Chetty

• Dell Technologies has helped consultancy firm Moyo introduce an autonomous drone into South Africa’s agriculture sector.

• The drone leverages Dell Technologies’ AI Factory with NVIDIA to detect potato leaf disease.

• This is expected to enhance agricultural surveillance for timely interventions, as well as reducing losses and improving yield quality.

In May this year, Dell Technologies announced that it was working with NVIDIA to add more capabilities to its AI Factory in the hopes that customers would leverage the platform to develop AI-powered solutions.

Now a local company has done just that, with consultancy firm Moyo an AI drone solution designed to detect diseases in crops before they become an issue, an in particular potato leaf disease.

The AI drone is intended for use in the South African agriculture sector, and could present a number of long-term benefits for local farmers and businesses. ″This new solution developed using the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA and Precision AI-ready workstations can support South Africa’s agriculture sector with advanced crop health monitoring,″ explained Dell Technologies in a release shared with Hypertext.

Further unpacking the advantages of such an AI-powered solution, Moyo and Dell Technologies noted that it can be used for enhanced agricultural surveillance, which allows for timely interventions, reduced losses, and improved yield quality.  

″The drone developed by Moyo employs a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system, combining high-resolution image capture with AI-based leaf pattern analysis. The neural network is trained to identify early disease signs, such as fungal infections, greatly enhancing the precision and depth of disease detection,″ Dell Technologies added.

As for how the AI Factory was leveraged in the development of such a solution, Moyo pointed out that it utilised AI-ready workstations with the NVIDIA accelerated computing  platform. These include NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for the development and deployment of production-grade generative AI applications.

With this platform Moyo said it was able to run genAI testing and drive model training via the NVIDIA AI Workbench to a final accuracy rate of 99.52 percent, which was achieved in two weeks.

″For companies using AI, having a reliable partner and high-performance technology is crucial. Dell Technologies has been a leading player in the AI space, offering the industry’s broadest portfolio of solutions designed specifically for AI workloads. This expertise was crucial in creating the drone AI model and will continue to be as we create other AI-driven solutions that can support South Africa’s agriculture sector,″ noted Philip Heydenrych, director at Moyo.

It will be interesting to see how this newly developed solution will be implemented locally moving forward, and what other offerings can be created via the Dell AI Factory.

Read the original article on Hypertext.