UAS services and agricultural intelligence provider GreenSight Agronomics has announced that on Dec. 15 of last year, it was granted a waiver from the FAA to operate its UAS beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS).

With this waiver, GreenSight, which provides daily monitoring services at top-5 agrochemical company test sites, golf courses, and farms, will be able to operate its UAS remotely from its Boston command center. The waiver still requires a local visual observer, though.

GreenSight, which says that it is just the ninth company to obtain a BVLOS waiver from the FAA, will use this waiver to begin testing BVLOS operations at a customer site.

“GreenSight already provides our golf course and agricultural customers insight into their water and chemical needs allowing them to make better management decisions,” says GreenSight CEO, James Peverill.

“This waiver is a first step in reducing the overhead of obtaining this information from our drones, letting our customers focus on their properties.”

In order to obtain this waiver, GreenSight had to have its application and supporting documentation for the waiver reviewed by the FAA, to make sure that they were in compliance with the CFR 107.200 regulations. The company outlined the risks and mitigation associated with the operations, and was granted the waiver towards the end of 2017.

According to GreenSight, its proprietary UAS “has racked up impressive reliability numbers,” accumulating more than 500 hours in the air with no incidents.

In limited release for last year, GreenSight captured more than 100,000 acres of imagery at customer locations in the US, Canada and Europe.

Peverill says, “our customers have been very open to obtaining FAA remote pilot certificates to operate our systems on their properties, but as we expand operations in 2018 we continue to execute our development roadmap towards fully unattended operations.”

Founded in 2015, GreenSight is developing the next generation agricultural intelligence platform. The company says that it delivers “actionable alerts” on soil moisture, pest stress, and nutrient deficiency to land managers, thanks to the combination of autonomy, custom sensors, and machine learning based data analytics technology.