British engineering and innovative tech firm CAL International have teamed up with Australian green tech start-up AirSeed Technologies to embark on a ground-breaking climate change initiative, which will see the aerial platform technology aim to plant 100 million trees by 2024.
The ground-breaking Anglo-Australian project and technology will not only tackle deforestation but also help in the significant fightback against global warming.
CAL International working in partnership with AirSeed Technologies, has designed and engineered a seed pod delivery system that sits as “the engine” of AirSeed’s unique tree-planting aerial drone technology.
Use your drone to save planet Earth!
Over the past 30 years, the world has lost more than 300 million trees through deforestation, natural disasters and human consumption.
The Knowsley-based company, run by entrepreneur and tech disruptor Cliff Kirby, was approached by Australian-based AirSeed Co-Founder Andrew Walker to assist in refining the planting systems for their drone technology.
The mission brief was to take AirSeed’s existing delivery system and refine the design of the user interface and manufacturability of the seed pod delivery system The AirSeed drone, which uses artificial and data intelligence, is a payload and delivery system that identifies and locates designated target areas with GPS coordinates and then fires carbon pods onto the ground at a rate of two-per-second.
The carbon pods are then pinpointed on the mapping system in line with the flight trajectory, which also considers wind variables and conditions on the planting day. This allows the drone to return on a reconnaissance flight via the same route to identify and map tree growth.
The goal
Using a two-person team, an AirSeed drone aims to plant 40,000 pods per day.
The pods each carry a gram of carbon from rotting and dying vegetation. The pod protects the seed in the germination cycle from combative elements such as insects, rodents and birds. The seed pod is activated when it rains, carbon-absorbing the water and allowing the seed to germinate.
The collaboration between CAL and AirSeed will ultimately mean that each drone can deliver two pods per second over a designated area, planting up to 40,000 pods daily. Through rapid automation and scale of the process, it can cover and penetrate a much wider geographical area.”
AirSeed was co-founded by British-born entrepreneur and engineer Andrew Walker and South African data-mapping analyst and Chief Pilot Andries Louw. Together. They created the AirSeed team, comprised of experienced professionals in engineering, ecology, marine and terrestrial microbiology and data science.
Traditional manual planting solutions are slow, labour-intensive, expensive, and ineffective in mitigating today’s deforestation rate. AirSeed’s aerial platform is 80% cheaper than current planting methods and 25 times faster than manual planting methods.