A ‘smart agricopter’ has been developed by the brilliant students of the renowned Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras to eliminate manual spraying of pesticides in agricultural farms and enable them to recognize crop health through an imaging camera.
The new smart drone technology is the one the latest innovation in India which will help and support them for spraying pesticides 10 times faster and with 100% accuracy at the same price as manual spraying.
The Centre for Innovation, Indian Institute of Technology Madras students identified that manual spraying of pesticide is a very dangerous activity that puts the farmers and laborers health at stake and also leads to serious health problems when massive overuse of toxic chemicals is done.
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The smart gadget is developed by a Group of three students and later they planned to design a technological solution that would eradicate the need for farmers to come in contact with pesticides and smartly filter out which crops on their agriculture land need fertilizers and which do not.
The advanced multispectral imaging camera enables the hexacopter drone to create smart maps of the agriculture land based on crop health and it’s 100 percent autonomous pesticide refilling system ensures whole spraying is completely autonomous.
Rishabh Verma, aerospace engineering student said that “Agriculture is the backbone of our country & there is a desperate need to upgrade the backbone. We are automating a multi-billion dollar manual pesticide spraying industry using cutting edge drone technology”.
The students have also taken the initiative to file a patent for the agricopter whose price is estimated to be around Rs. 5.1 lakh.
The main Unique Selling Preposition (U.S.P.) of agricopter when compared to similar existing products in the world is the multi spectral imaging camera that provides smart analysis of crop health & also assures that the entire spraying process is totally autonomous and that the cultivator is never exposed to any sort of toxic chemicals or pesticides.
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Another aerospace engineering student, Kavi Kailash said, “The current version of Project Smart Agricopter is a hexacopter drone that has the capacity to hold 15 liters of pesticide. Agricopter aims to spray pesticides 10 times faster & with 100% precision at the same cost as manual spraying”.
Additionally, the group of three students has also received a Rs. 10 lakh worth equity-less funding after their product won the Indian Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP 2.0) University Challenge held at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in June, 2019.
Akash Anand, an engineering design student said, “Our current challenge is to finish the construction of their alpha prototype & work towards testing the efficiency of their product on farms all over the country”.