To design and fabricate an antipest agrodrone

Pests are a serious threat to the crops, causing great yield losses. Growers throughout the world commonly use pesticides to protect crop from harmful pests. However, there are many adverse effects of pesticides on crops, people as well as on the environment. This project aims at providing e

Project Title

To design and fabricate an antipest agrodrone

Project Area of Specialization

Robotics

Project Summary

Pests are a serious threat to the crops, causing great yield losses. Growers throughout the world commonly use pesticides to protect crop from harmful pests. However, there are many adverse effects of pesticides on crops, people as well as on the environment.

This project aims at providing environment-friendly solution to the problem of enemy pests by designing and fabricating a morphable drone that is supposed to fly over the fields, hover close to plants (without harming them) and land to recharge on a suitable place in the crop fields. The proposed anti-pest Agrodrone is supposed to navigate through the crop by hovering aside from one plant to another. It will be equipped with a suitable digital video camera to capture images with a resolution sufficient enough to identify pests that are potentially harmful for the crop. This project will specifically deal with the pests in the cotton crop, which is one of the major parts of the agro-economy and the backbone of Pakistan's textile industry.

The drone will be equipped with a vacuum pump capable of sucking in the target pest viewed in the video on a remote computer. A human operator is supposed to connect to a computer in the fields and control the drone to look into the plants of the crop for the pests. See figure 1. Upon detection of a pest in a plant, the remotely operated suction pump will be activated to take the pest out of crop without harming the plant or other friendly pests.

Figure 1: Schematic representation of the system

Future developments of the system may include a remote connection of the gamepad controller (in an office or home) with a computer in the fields.

Project Objectives

• Design and fabricate the drone.
• Controlling it through a gamepad controller
• Navigate wirelessly though a cotton crop and successfully eliminate the destructive pests such as Thrips .
• Implement soft walls to restrict the drone’s flight to a confined and well defined region.

Project Implementation Method

The project implementation comprises the following steps.

1. In the first step we will evaluate the design the geomerty of the agrodrone on a CAD tool such as Autodesk Autocad.
2. Later, we will estimate the power requirement and calculate the payload.
3. Next, we will simulate this design using a CFD simulation tool (E.g. airshaper).
4. After successful simulations, we will fabricate this design on hardware with the calculated payload.
5. Program the on-board computer for wireless operation of its wings and the suction pump.

Benefits of the Project

This project will take the pests out of the crop by suction. This will eliminate the use of pesticides in agriculture. The harmful effects of pesticides will also be reduced on those who are actively involved in their application, on those who work in the fields at any stage, on consumers / immediate users of the crop, as well as on the environment. It will also help in decreasing industrial scale production of the pesticides that is yet another source of environmental pollution.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

A morphable agrodrone is supposed to be designed and fabricated, which will carry out anti-pest activities in the cotton crops. It is supposed to navigate through the crop by hovering aside from one plant to another. It would have the following features:

1. Morphable wings
2. A suction pump with sufficient power to catch the flying pests or pests resting on the plant leaves
3. Motors to drive winds as well as the suction pump
4. A suitable digital video camera to capture images with a resolution sufficient enough to identify pests that are potentially harmful for the crops
5. A transceiver onboard to transmit the video transmission to and receive commands from a nearby computer.
6. A battery to support its flight and operation of the onboard electronics

A human operator is supposed to connect to a computer in remote fields and remotely control the drone to look into the plants of the crop for the pests. Upon detection of a pest in a plant, the remotely operated suction pump will be activated to take the pest out of crop without harming the crop itself.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Agriculture

Other Industries

Agriculture

Core Technology

Robotics

Other Technologies

Clean Tech

Sustainable Development Goals

Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

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