A new project at MIT will use drones to monitor crops. Known as RaptorMaps, the project involves flying drones over farmland collecting images to track crop health and hopefully boost yields.

“We are making drones to feed the world,” said Forrest Meyen, a PhD student in aeronautics and astronautics and part of the RaptorMaps team.

By analyzing the images collected by the drones, the system can pinpoint damaged or diseased crops, which sometimes appear as white spots or curved lines in the field. Farmers can use this data, which is put online, to treat affected areas because small problems get out of hand.

The drones offer significant advantages over existing methods: they provide higher resolution images that can be found via satellite and they can can a large area in a fraction of the time it might take a farmer would manually.

The RaptorMaps team recently won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and the team says they will use the money to take their product to market.