selecta one case
Precision at Scale: Selecta one Elevates Breeding and Production with Autonomous Drones
Selecta one, a global leader in ornamental clonal breeding, is setting a new benchmark for efficiency by integrating autonomous drone technology across its international operations. By partnering with Corvus Drones, Selecta one is leveraging aerial automation to bridge the gap between high-volume production and precision data analysis.
Selecta one, a global leader in ornamental clonal breeding, is setting a new benchmark for efficiency by integrating autonomous drone technology across its international operations. By partnering with Corvus Drones, Selecta one is leveraging aerial automation to bridge the gap between high-volume production and precision data analysis.
Innovation in the Field: Kenya and Germany
Selecta one has deployed specialized drone applications tailored to the specific needs of its key locations:
- Production Monitoring (Kenya): In their East African greenhouses, autonomous drones provide continuous oversight of mother stock. The system monitors growth rates and identifies anomalies in real-time, ensuring optimal plant health and inventory control. After evaluation of the first pilot results, expansion to other crops and locations could be the next step.
- Advanced Phenotyping (Germany): At their German breeding facility, drones facilitate complex phenotyping. Here, the aerial data is fed into Selecta one’s developing proprietary computer vision and AI applications to accelerate the selection process.
Lydia Kienbaum is leading the development of the proprietary computer vision and AI applications as part of her PhD project. The title of the project is “Few-shot learning in horticultural plant phenotyping applications”. This development is in collaboration with the University of Bonn and embedded in the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob.
A Flexible Approach to Data Collection
This collaboration highlights the versatility of the Corvus Drones strategy, which prioritizes seamless integration. While Corvus offers a suite of standard AI pipelines, the platform also functions as a dedicated data-collection tool. In this "collection-only" model, imagery is automatically uploaded to a cloud bucket, allowing customers to process the data using their own specialized software. As image recognition and AI tools become more accessible and development cycles shorten, this flexibility allows growers to choose the workflow that best fits their technical infrastructure.
The Strategic Value of Automated Phenotyping
Why is Selecta one investing in automated phenotyping? The shift is driven by the inherent limitations of manual monitoring. Breeders often face significant challenges when capturing traits due to:
- Massive Scale: Monitoring thousands of individual plants is labor-intensive.
- Precision Requirements: High-level breeding requires granular data that human observation can struggle to maintain consistently.
- Time Constraints: Drone technology allows for the assessment of thousands of plants within minutes, freeing up breeders for high-level analysis.
By transitioning to drone-based monitoring, Selecta one ensures that observations are standardized, objective, and data-driven, ultimately leads to faster innovation and higher-quality ornamental varieties.
Quote Dr Dominik Losert, Plant Breeding Director Pot plants at Selecta one
”Is the data perfect yet? No. The correlation with our manual assessments is still being validated, and the analysis pipeline is very much work in progress. But the pace of development is remarkable. What excites me most is not the technology itself — it is what it could mean for breeding decisions: more data points, more objectivity, fewer bottlenecks. The breeder’s eye remains essential. But it might soon become a very capable co-pilot in the breeding process.”
