The precision agriculture techniques and providers business surpassed $6.6 billion in worth final 12 months, and the market is anticipated to develop at a compound annual progress price of practically 15% for the rest of the last decade. This spectacular progress 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, equivalent to GPS, drones, sensors, and knowledge analytics, to optimize varied 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 impression, there’s a important problem that should be addressed. Most business options obtainable as we speak are prohibitively costly, inserting 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 battle to compete.
As of 2021, 89 p.c of farms in america have been small household farms in accordance with the USDA. These farms account for practically 50 p.c of all farmland within the nation, so excluding them from taking part in cutting-edge precision agriculture strategies is a detriment not solely to those small farmers, but additionally to meals provides and the setting.
A software program engineer and hacker that goes by the deal with kp finds this example troubling, and so determined to attempt 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 operating fashionable AI algorithms, this wheeled robotic might assist small farmers sustain with the fast modifications of their area (pun supposed).
The chassis of the Agrofelis Robotic was designed such that it might moderately be manufactured in an area machine store. The 4 wheels are pushed by energy-efficient in-hub motors which might 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 profit from the obtainable power 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 regulate the robotic, course of sensor knowledge, run AI algorithms, deal with communications, and extra. A high-speed digicam can also be onboard for pc imaginative and prescient functions, like crop inspections.
On prime of the robotic, there’s a rotating base the place varied implements could be connected to go well with a wide range of functions. These implements might embody sprayers, fertilizer spreaders, robotic selecting arms, or further sensors.
Given the open supply, programmable design of the Agrofelis Robotic, the use instances for the robotic could be closely tailor-made to a person farm’s wants, and may even change all through the course of a season, as wants shift. It was additionally famous by kp that this flexibility may permit the robotic to tackle fully totally different duties, like preventing wildfires.
As constructed on this challenge, the elements record got here in at about $4,000, excluding transport 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 price and cutting-edge capabilities of a completed construct. You’ll want to try the challenge write-up for the main points you have to to construct your personal robotic.The low-cost, customizable Agrofelis Robotic (📷: kp)
Assembling the automobile’s base (📷: kp)
The computing {hardware} (📷: kp)
