The precision agriculture techniques and companies business surpassed $6.6 billion in worth final yr, and the market is anticipated to develop at a compound annual development price of almost 15% for the rest of the last decade. This spectacular development underscores the rising significance of precision agriculture in fashionable farming practices. Precision agriculture represents a major shift from conventional farming strategies. It leverages cutting-edge applied sciences, corresponding to GPS, drones, sensors, and knowledge analytics, to optimize numerous facets of farming operations, from planting and irrigation to pest management and harvest administration.
Whereas precision agriculture holds immense promise for enhancing crop yields, minimizing useful resource wastage, and lowering environmental influence, there’s a important problem that have to be addressed. Most business options out there immediately are prohibitively costly, putting them far out of attain for almost all small-scale farmers. This creates a regarding disparity in entry to the advantages of precision agriculture expertise, with bigger, wealthier farms reaping the rewards whereas smaller operations battle to compete.
As of 2021, 89 % of farms in the USA had been small household farms in keeping with the USDA. These farms account for almost 50 % of all farmland within the nation, so excluding them from collaborating in cutting-edge precision agriculture methods is a detriment not solely to those small farmers, but additionally to meals provides and the atmosphere.
A software program engineer and hacker that goes by the deal with kp finds this case troubling, and so determined to try to do one thing about it. That resulted within the improvement of an open robotic platform referred to as the Agrofelis Robotic. Designed to be low-cost, customizable, and able to working fashionable AI algorithms, this wheeled robotic may assist small farmers sustain with the fast adjustments of their area (pun supposed).
The chassis of the Agrofelis Robotic was designed such that it may moderately be manufactured in a neighborhood machine store. The 4 wheels are pushed by energy-efficient in-hub motors which are regulated through real-time suggestions sensors. A pair of impartial linear actuators assist the robotic’s steering capabilities. The sturdy design permits the Agrofelis Robotic to hold a load of as much as 550 kilos.
Energy is delivered by eight-element LiFePO4 batteries rated at 302 amps, offering eight kWh of vitality in a one sq. meter area. An clever battery administration system was included to profit from the out there vitality sources, and likewise to energy the onboard sensors and compute {hardware}. An NVIDIA Jetson Nano single board pc, a Google Coral AI accelerator, and Arduino microcontrollers are included to manage the robotic, course of sensor knowledge, run AI algorithms, deal with communications, and extra. A high-speed digital camera can also be onboard for pc imaginative and prescient purposes, like crop inspections.
On prime of the robotic, there’s a rotating base the place numerous implements will be connected to go well with a wide range of purposes. These implements may embody sprayers, fertilizer spreaders, robotic choosing arms, or further sensors.
Given the open supply, programmable design of the Agrofelis Robotic, the use circumstances for the robotic will be closely tailor-made to a person farm’s wants, and might even change all through the course of a season, as wants shift. It was additionally famous by kp that this flexibility would possibly enable the robotic to tackle utterly totally different duties, like combating wildfires.
As constructed on this mission, the elements listing got here in at about $4,000, excluding transport and meeting prices. Undoubtedly, constructing a customized Agrofelis Robotic would take lots of effort and time, nevertheless it might be value it for a lot of small farmers contemplating the low value and cutting-edge capabilities of a completed construct. Make sure to try the mission write-up for the small print you’ll need to construct your individual robotic.The low-cost, customizable Agrofelis Robotic (📷: kp)
Assembling the automobile’s base (📷: kp)
The computing {hardware} (📷: kp)
