Students from Lovely Professional University (LPU), a private university based out of Jalandhar, Punjab, has conceptualised and designed the ‘Flying Farmer’, a drone that would be exclusively deployed in farming and field survey.
The wireless ‘Flying Farmer’, sensor device that would be used in mapping and survey of yields and biomass, the varsity said in a statement here on Friday.
It estimates the nutrient content of the soil to aid production growth and reduce crop damage.
Each drone can fly for 25 minutes on a full charge and the entire device cost between Rs 10,000 – 15,000.
45 students and 5 faculty members from the Electronics, Mechanical, and Agricultural Engineering department have been actively involved in developing this drone technology.
The ‘Flying Farmer’ is designed to solve two major agricultural issues faced by farmers – pesticide treatment and weed detection.
With rising labor costs and a shortage of labor, this drone technology would more useful for the agriculture to replace human intervention in delivering pesticide treatment, the statement said.
Pre-programmed drones would target specific farm areas and crops to deliver pesticides, avoiding wastage and over the use of pesticides besides human weed detection is inefficient and prone to error, leading to lower produce.
Drones, programmed with computer vision algorithms and infrared sensors can detect the exact position and nature of weeds and transmit information to the farmer for timely action.
The field trials conducted at LPU led to an improvement of 15-20 per cent in produce quantity.
Chancellor of Lovely Professional University, Ashok Mittal said, Drone-powered technology is already revolutionising agriculture, bringing precision to farming and allowing farmers to constantly monitor crop conditions.
We are proud of the level of innovation and thinking that has gone into this project and will continue to empower our students to create solutions for real-life problems.
The University will not file for a patent but instead, will open source the technology so that it can be inexpensively available to any farmer, anywhere.
The University leveraged an internal research grant of Rs 1.2 crore to develop the technology.
LPU School of Agriculture which is among the top Agricultural Science colleges in the country, is the first Indian Private University to be granted ICAR accreditation by the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India.
The University’s farmland is spread over 1000 acres where students from the Department of Agriculture can put their knowledge and understanding into practice.(UNI)
