Why the Survey Flight Is the Safety System
Satellite basemaps in flight planning apps are often months or years old. New power lines, irrigation pivots, grown trees, and temporary structures simply aren't there. When a spray drone operates at crop height, the survey flight is not an optional agronomy step — it is the primary hazard assessment.
A mapping drone flies the same field first, higher and safer, and produces a high-resolution orthomosaic of the field as it exists today. Every obstacle is visible, every boundary is exact, and the terrain model shows slopes the spray drone must respect. Marking hazards on fresh imagery instead of memory or outdated maps is the single biggest risk reduction available to a spray operation.
The same flight also carries the agronomic payload: if flown with a multispectral drone, it yields NDVI, NDRE or GNDVI maps that drive variable-rate decisions — and even an RGB-only drone gives RGB indices such as VARI and ExG, no multispectral camera needed. One flight, two outputs — safety and prescription. See survey with multispectral drones for which platforms capture what.
Step by Step: Two Pilots, One Project
1. The monitoring pilot flies the survey
A Mavic 3 Multispectral, P4 Multispectral, Matrice 4E or another supported DJI survey drone maps the field in a standard grid mission. This pilot can be a dedicated scout covering many fields per day, well ahead of the spray team.
2. DroneField processes at the field edge
Images import straight from the SD card, and local processing turns them into an orthomosaic, elevation model and NDVI/NDRE maps in minutes — a 20 ha field at 5 cm/px takes under 5 minutes on a Mac mini M4 — with no upload, no waiting and no internet needed. That's the core promise of the software behind the workflow.
3. Boundaries and obstacles are marked
On the fresh orthomosaic, the pilot traces the field boundary — by hand or with the on-device AI field boundary, which follows the field edge from a single click — and marks every hazard as an obstacle or no-spray zone: power lines, poles, trees, buildings, pivots. Because the imagery is from an hour ago, nothing is missing. The AI field boundary documentation covers the tools in detail.
4. The index map becomes a prescription
One click turns the index map into a gridded application map matched to the spray swath, zoned by mean index or by the share of living plants per cell — full rate where pressure is high, reduced or zero where the crop is clean. Optional Luna AI analysis can propose zones and doses with an agronomic explanation, but the operator makes the final call. Choosing the right index for the growth stage matters here; our guide to understanding the maps explains NDVI vs NDRE in practice.
5. The spray pilot receives a ready flight plan
Through DroneField project sharing, the spray pilot gets the complete package — orthomosaic, boundaries with obstacles, and the variable-rate prescription — exported for their machine: DJI Agras (T20 to T100), XAG, or ABZ Innovation, plus Hardi VRA Shapefile, ISOXML V3/V4 and Shapefile for ground rigs. The spray pilot never has to re-survey or re-draw anything.
6. The farmer sees the result
Via a project sharing link, the client opens the field in a web viewer — orthomosaic, index map, boundary and precision map — and downloads the prescription and AI report without installing anything; a one-click PDF survey report is also available. It turns an invoice into evidence.
Why Local Processing Makes This Workflow Possible
The two-pilot workflow only works if the map is ready before the spray drone arrives. Cloud processing breaks it: uploading 30 GB from a field edge on rural mobile data, then queueing for hours, means the survey data is ready tomorrow — and the spray job either waits or flies blind.
DroneField runs the entire pipeline on the monitoring pilot's laptop, offline. The turnaround from landing the survey drone to sending the spray pilot a finished flight plan is minutes. When conditions change fast — disease pressure after rain, a narrow spray window before wind picks up — that turnaround is the difference between a precise application and a missed one.
It also changes the economics: no per-hectare processing fees means the survey flight costs battery time, nothing more. Operators fly more surveys, which means fresher obstacle data and better prescriptions. Pricing is a simple subscription — 699 € + VAT per year per device, with unlimited projects — or a one-off project license for occasional jobs.
Built From Real Spray Operations
This workflow isn't a product manager's diagram — it is how the DroneField team runs its own commercial spraying business. The obstacle-marking tools exist because we've had close calls with unmarked wires. Project sharing exists because our monitoring pilot and spray pilots are different people in different trucks. Project sharing for clients exists because they kept asking to see what they paid for.
If you're evaluating tools for a spraying operation, compare the workflow end to end, not feature checklists: the feature overview shows everything included, and the comparison pages show how DroneField differs from Pix4DFields and DroneDeploy for ag spray work specifically.