In May, Dell Technologies announced its collaboration with NVIDIA to expand the capabilities of its AI Factory, aiming to help customers develop AI-powered solutions. Now, a South African company has leveraged this platform to create an AI drone solution designed to detect crop diseases early, particularly potato leaf disease.
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Moyo, a consultancy firm, developed the AI drone to benefit the local agriculture sector. This technology could bring long-term advantages to farmers and businesses by improving crop health monitoring. “This new solution, developed using Dell’s AI Factory with NVIDIA and Precision AI-ready workstations, can support South Africa’s agriculture sector with advanced crop health surveillance,” Dell Technologies shared in a statement.
The AI-powered drone enhances agricultural monitoring by providing timely interventions, reducing losses, and improving yield quality. Moyo’s solution uses a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system, which combines high-resolution image capture with AI-based analysis of leaf patterns. The neural network is trained to detect early signs of disease, such as fungal infections, significantly improving the precision of disease detection.
Moyo utilized Dell’s AI-ready workstations with the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform, including NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for developing and deploying generative AI applications. Using this platform, Moyo achieved a 99.52% accuracy rate in disease detection within two weeks.
“For companies using AI, having a reliable partner and high-performance technology is crucial,” said Philip Heydenrych, director at Moyo. “Dell Technologies has been a leading player in AI, and their expertise was key in creating the drone AI model and will be critical for future AI-driven solutions to support South African agriculture.”
As the AI drone solution rolls out, it will be interesting to see how it’s implemented locally and what future innovations emerge from the Dell AI Factory.
