Let us Farm

Almost finished, missing webcam, but all servos working
Car assembling
Initial camera mounting setup
Servo debugging
finished, all parts working
Another Angle
UI

Inspiration

Sustainable farming of leafy greens has a significant positive environmental impact and increases food security around the globe. We want build a robot that allows high-efficiency farming and increases quality of life for vegetable farmers.

What it does

It's an autonomous rover that gets sent out into the crop field at a selected location from a web-based mini-map, picks up a sample crop from the desired location, contains it, then routes its way back to home base for inspection and crop evaluation. With large area farms in North America (average farm area of > 2 square km, it can take a significant time for farmers to get samples of their crops. With our robot, the farmer can set it to sample at a selected location, and then go grab coffee or do other work. When the farmer comes back, the robot will be on location ready to sample and return.

How we built it

We are using an ESP32 for rover movement (4x DC motors), arm control (2x servos), and grabber control (2x servos). Our 3 joint arm and grabber allows for high crop gathering dexterity and fine tuning, with a Raspberry Pi for live video feed.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to tune the motors so it ran as intended Figuring out how to connect to the robot wirelessly, and control it wirelessly Figuring out how to move the arm for crop gathering dexterity

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the robot to connect and move wirelessly, with live video feed. Building our 3 joint arm and grabber. Being able to grab lettuce.

What we learned

How to get a robot to move wirelessly using a microcontroller How to drive multiple high current servos with LiPo batteries and ESCs.

What's next for Let us Farm

Add more dexterity functions, automations, and machine vision capabilities to autocorrect its course. Add IMU, GPS, and extended Kalman filtering for accurate localization and mapping capabilities.