Kidobotikzians rewrite the history of Farming with AgriBot

For most of you who know a thing or two about Agriculture, it should not come as a surprise that Farming is inherently a laborious process. All of us have at one point in our lives been to the rural countryside and witnessed the happenings on patches of lands under cultivation. 

However, amidst all the sightseeing and nature watching, what most of us don’t realize is the fact that farming is not just about clearing a piece of land, watering it and seeding it with grains. It’s a major science onto itself. The process of farming requires a lot of labour with the inherent activities such as ploughing, seed laying, irrigation and manuring. More importantly, it also involves the process of weeding. Weeds which arise a few after the seeds have been laid deprive the soil of vital nutrients and compete with the crops for resources such as water and sunlight. These undesirable plants wreak havoc on the crop by competing for resources.

The processes of removing these invaders from the furrows is a highly labour intensive task and one that has remained manual for centuries.

What if we said that Kidobotikz has engineered a solution for this niche issue?

Say hello to AgriBot.

Ananya Hi-Tech Farms in association with Kidobotikz is developing AgriBot, a four wheeled robotic assistant that can take over the activity of farming from humans. It is a robot that has been envisioned with a desire to reduce the burden on farmers and optimise the entire process of farming. Kidobotikz with its talented pool of students and a dedicated R&D team has taken this up as a challenge and develop a well engineered Agribot which is capable of taking over the field from humans and introducing high technology in the area of farming.

This is the first time such a robot has been developed in the country. The 9 membered team which developed this robots consists entirely of school students. To develop the robot from scratch to completion, the team took under 2 months. 

To say more about AgriBot, it is a wheeled robotic assistant that has compact dimensions optimised to take over narrow passageways between furrows of crops. The robot consists of a universal drive train, which currently fitted with a weeder, can be retrofitted in the future to suit other applications such as seed laying. Running at a leisurely pace of 15 RPM, the robot can cover a patch of land measuring 250 meters in length in less than an hour. Working in tandem, a swarm of such robots can remove the weeds from a vast patch of land in record time. At present, weeding done manually takes weeks to be completed. Automating this process can help farmers monitor other vital parameters of the crop such as plant health, nutrient levels etc. 

As a part of its Beta-testing, it was deployed for weeding at one of Ananya Farms’ Capsicum plantations in Hosur where the weeding process is currently manual. With the successful completion of AgriBot's  Beta-testing, it is now expected that Agribot will make this process efficient with its automation.

AgriBot @Ananya Hi-Tech Farms

Happy Roboting!