A rotary wing drone captures images over a weed research plot at Texas A&M University, College Station.
Texas A&M University System researchers are working to establish a configurable, adaptive and scalable swarm system consisting of unmanned ground and aerial robots designed to assist in collaborative smart agriculture tasks.
The use of adaptive swarm robotics has the potential to provide significant environmental and economic benefits to smart agriculture efforts globally through the implementation of autonomous ground and aerial technologies.
“Agricultural robots, when used properly, can improve product quantity and quality while lowering the cost,” said Kiju Lee, associate professor and Charlotte and Walter Buchanan Faculty Fellow in the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution and the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M.
A swarm robotics project is being led jointly by Lee, Muthukumar Bagavathiannan, Texas A&M AgriLife Research weed scientist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Soil and Crop Sciences; and Juan Landivar, center director at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Corpus Christi.
Other investigators on the team include John Cason, AgriLife Research peanut breeder, Stephenville; Robert Hardin, agricultural engineering assistant professor, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering; Luis Tedeschi, AgriLife Research ruminant nutritionist, Department of Animal Science; Dugan Um, associate professor, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Mahendra Bhandari, AgriLife Research crop physiologist, Corpus Christi.
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