By Dee Shore
A technological revolution is taking flight at North Carolina’s agricultural research stations.
At the Sandhills Research Station in Jackson Spring, a drone emerges from a weatherproof box, ascends to a pre-programmed altitude and flies over acres of fields, collecting images that will push forward solutions to make agriculture more data-driven, profitable and sustainable.
There’s no pilot on-site holding a remote control. Instead, the mission is initiated from a computer miles away at NC State University’s campus in Raleigh.
The autonomous drone flight is the next phase of a project called AIRS, short for Automating Intelligence from Research Stations.
In December 2025, the three-year-old project released a software suite that enables researchers to tap into data and images collected weekly from drone-mounted cameras at the Sandhills station and the Central Crops Research Station in Clayton.
While the project team’s efforts have focused on making it easier and more efficient for researchers to get reliable, comparable data from their field experiments, leader Chris Reberg-Horton calls the software release “just the tip of the iceberg” — a starting point toward creating an archive of data from each one of the state’s 18 agricultural research stations, every week, to answer both current and future research questions.
Source : ncsu.edu