A drone lifts off over a paddock at Boorowa Agricultural Research Station, the breeze from its rotors setting the tall, uncut grass below rippling. At the controls, Stuart Brown, a senior research technician at CSIRO, keeps a careful eye on the attached LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor as it fires an invisible lattice of laser pulses at the grass, building a three-dimensional map of the paddock, one small cube of space at a time.