45 students and 5 faculty members of Lovely Professional University, Punjab have successfully come out with a drone code named the Flying Farmer. The students and professors from the departments of Agricultural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Electronics of University have collaborated and pooled their innovative minds to create a drone that could help the farmers with maintenance and preservation of their farms.
The drone – Flying Farmer can detect the presence of weed using computer vision algorithm and Infrared sensors. It can hover around the target area for approximately 25 minutes and in that time it can either act as a surveillance drone to check the field for weeds and it can disperse pesticides effectively.
As far as human efforts are concerned, we have less skilled personnel to work in a large field and at times like that, not all weeds in a region could be found. Thanks to these college kids, the Flying Farmer can detect weeds and disperse the right amount of pesticides a plant would need.
Too much sprinkling pesticides result in waste of money and costs the lives of the plants too. A model field was chosen and the drone’s efficiency was tested. It was found out that Flying Farmer has increased the yield by 15-20%. Ashok Mittal, the Chancellor of the University congratulated his students and said the university will not patent this much needed invention in the field of agriculture and will make it an open-source project so that anyone can make use of the Flying Farmer. The drone’s manufacturing cost would be between INR 10 to 15k . An additional Rs. 1.2 Crore has been sanctioned by the university to further develop this project to great standards.