The precision agriculture programs and companies business surpassed $6.6 billion in worth final 12 months, and the market is predicted to develop at a compound annual progress fee of practically 15% for the rest of the last decade. This spectacular progress underscores the rising significance of precision agriculture in trendy farming practices. Precision agriculture represents a big shift from conventional farming strategies. It leverages cutting-edge applied sciences, reminiscent of GPS, drones, sensors, and knowledge analytics, to optimize numerous features of farming operations, from planting and irrigation to pest management and harvest administration.
Whereas precision agriculture holds immense promise for bettering crop yields, minimizing useful resource wastage, and lowering environmental impression, there’s a vital problem that should be addressed. Most business options accessible right now are prohibitively costly, putting them far out of attain for practically all small-scale farmers. This creates a regarding disparity in entry to the advantages of precision agriculture know-how, with bigger, wealthier farms reaping the rewards whereas smaller operations wrestle to compete.
As of 2021, 89 % of farms in america have been small household farms based on the USDA. These farms account for practically 50 % of all farmland within the nation, so excluding them from taking part in cutting-edge precision agriculture methods is a detriment not solely to those small farmers, but in addition to meals provides and the setting.
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 known as the Agrofelis Robotic. Designed to be low-cost, customizable, and able to operating trendy AI algorithms, this wheeled robotic might assist small farmers sustain with the speedy adjustments of their subject (pun supposed).
The chassis of the Agrofelis Robotic was designed such that it might fairly be manufactured in an area machine store. The 4 wheels are pushed by energy-efficient in-hub motors which can be regulated through real-time suggestions sensors. A pair of unbiased 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 power in a one sq. meter area. An clever battery administration system was included to benefit from the accessible power sources, and in addition to energy the onboard sensors and compute {hardware}. An NVIDIA Jetson Nano single board laptop, 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 digicam can also be onboard for laptop imaginative and prescient purposes, like crop inspections.
On prime of the robotic, there’s a rotating base the place numerous implements may be hooked up to go well with a wide range of purposes. These implements might embrace sprayers, fertilizer spreaders, robotic selecting arms, or extra sensors.
Given the open supply, programmable design of the Agrofelis Robotic, the use circumstances for the robotic may 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 fully completely different duties, like preventing wildfires.
As constructed on this undertaking, the elements checklist got here in at about $4,000, excluding delivery and meeting prices. Undoubtedly, constructing a customized Agrofelis Robotic would take loads of effort and time, nevertheless it could be price it for a lot of small farmers contemplating the low value and cutting-edge capabilities of a completed construct. You’ll want to take a look at the undertaking write-up for the small print you have to to construct your individual robotic.The low-cost, customizable Agrofelis Robotic (📷: kp)
Assembling the car’s base (📷: kp)
The computing {hardware} (📷: kp)