UBC AgroBot

We are a diverse team of students from across different engineering disciplines. With a shared passion for innovation and technology, we hope to explore robotics in farming, contributing to the future of agriculture in transitioning from human labour to full automation. As the world population grows, climate change continues and reliable human labo... ur becomes increasingly expensive, we must find more efficient and sustainable ways to grow food and sustain ourselves. The UBC AgroBot team will be building a fully autonomous robot capable of analyzing its environment and performing targeted weeding, fertilizing and soil analysis though the use of advanced robotics, image recognition and machine learning. We intend to use the Tensorflow object identification module, training and fine-tuning our own recognition model for crops and weeds We will be engineering the specific mechanics of the AgroBot, designing the chasis and exterminating mechanism, ultimately integrating them with the Robot Operating System This project will be competing in the AGgrowBOT challenge at Purdue University, Indiana. This competition attracts many teams from companies and universities across North America. The objectives of the competition are to create an autonomous machine capable of navigating a wheat field to identify weeds and analyze crop health. Upon identification of the wheat plant, the machine should determine if the plant is healthy or in distress which requires fertilizer to be applied by the machine. Upon identification of a weed, the machine should eradicate the weed chemically and/or mechanically. The competition will be judged by reputable members of the agricultural technology industry, such as The Climate Corporation (Monsanto), and Blue River Technology. The image recognition team works with algorithms closely, in order to train an efficient and accurate crop recognition model The chassis team will design the basic frame that the AgroBot runs on, giving AgroBot the ability to steer and maneuver The exterminating ...Read More