Ichigo: The Agricultural Bot

Story

With a high increase in the global population levels, the demand for resources mainly food that is highly necessary to sustain life is on the rise and is the biggest need of the future. The current outputs generated by the agricultural industries and lands is highly not sufficient to feed such huge numbers of people. To obtain this, we will have to increase the efficiency of the existing farming practices with the help of technology and this is exactly what we plan to do.
There are high suicidal rates among farmers in many places like India because of the crop destruction that happens due to certain plant diseases. This could be avoided and we could save the lives of many farmers as well as keep contributing to the global food supply if there was a well implemented method to keep check on each and every plant in the field. This is important as a single affected plant can still have the potential to spoil the whole field.

Ichigo which is a robotic rover that can go on almost all field terrains can help get the status of the entire field in terms of the plant health regarding the contraction of any plant diseases by the plant. The rover can be controlled from outside the field using a controller that also helps you click the picture of every desired leaf and later these images are then fed to a convolutional neural network to predict if the plant is affected by a disease or not. This would considerably revolutionise the lives of the farmers and could increase the efficiency of farming. The rover is also added with extra functionalities like giving the location of the diseased plant using GPS data and not destroying the crops using obstacle avoidance which is implemented through an ultrasonic sensor and is also equipped with a robotic arm that helps you cut off the weeds.
Overview
This project mainly has three major parts to it, the Sony playstation controller that sends the required signal, the computer which receives those signals and transmit them to the rover and also performs the image processing and the third part being the rover which follows the commands sent by the computer.
Link for further reference: https://www.hackster.io/varunsharman/ichigo-the-agricultural-bot-c5eaae