Problem Description

Organic vegetable farming introduces several challenges for farmers in achieving high-quality crops and high crop yield. Most notably, without artificial pesticides and herbicides, it is extremely challenging to control the invasion of pests into the crop beds. Pests may directly harm the crops by eating them or spreading diseases. The longer an infestation goes unnoticed, the more difficult it becomes to control. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for organic farmers to monitor their fields for pest pressures in order to prevent more widespread damage.

Robotic monitoring of organic vegetable farms pose a potential solution. Mitigating diseases and pests is very specific to each threat, and a robot which could handle every threat it encounters would be prohibitively complex. However, a robot which can automatically survey the field for disease and pest pressure, and deliver reports on disease and pest pressure to farmers so that they may respond in a timely and informed manner would deliver significant value to farmers. 

Use Case

Monitoring

To use the monitoring mode, the user moves the robot to the field, selects the monitoring mode and places it at the start of the first row. The robot autonomously collects visual data from the field by autonomously shifting through the rows while traversing through a row.
After collecting data the robot reaches the starting point again from where the user moves the robot back to the barn and connects it to the docking station. The robot processes the data and provides insights to the user about plant health in the form of heat maps, locations, and trends
in pest and disease pressures.