Course: Industry-Associated Capstones in Mechanical Engineering, spring 2018
Project team: Ankit Agarwal, Austin Young, Eric Zhang, Kenny Zhen
The AgBot project is a collaboration with Siemens to develop a robot to optimize data collection efforts in agriculture. To inform their work, the student team performed user interviews with local farmers and owners of vertical farms to determine which data and metrics would be most useful to collect. From there, they designed and prototyped a mount to interface with a Braccio robotic arm, Raspberry Pi Grove sensors, and Raspberry Pi cameras. They also integrated vision analysis to determine plant health and develop thresholding efforts for autonomous movements, and to boost ease of use. Finally, they developed a graphical user interface to control robot movements, perform data collection, and explain results. Looking ahead, future development efforts would be aimed at redesigning the robot’s base to increase mobility and power capabilities, as well as implementing autonomous movement using the current vision analysis capabilities of the robot.
Want to learn more about AgBot and its designers? Check out:
Austin Young on LinkedIn / portfolio
Kenny Zhen on LinkedIn / portfolio
Topics: Food, Robotics