CS&E Team Wins the Excellence in Small Farm Technology Award at Farm Robotics Competition
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) students recently competed in the Farm Robotics Challenge (Air Category) and won the Excellence in Small Farm Technology award. The team, including undergraduate Greta Brown, and PhD students Ebasa Temesgen, and Mario Jerez, presented their work virtually for the Farms Robotics Challenge. Their design project, titled “FarmGuard’s Multi-Robot Deer Deterrence System”, aims to scare deer away from crops in farms.
The motivation behind FarmGuard was to assist local farmers and address the challenges they face in their work. The team wanted to solve a pressing problem farmers were facing without taking people’s jobs or adding unnecessary features. The design process started in November and the competition concluded in April in Maria Gini’s Next Generation Robotics Lab. During this time, the team combined hardware, computer vision, and path planning to patrol and protect farmlands in collaboration with a local farmer.
“This project had a good structure and a strong motivation,” Brown said. “We’re not just making robots for robot's sake, but because there are actual problems to be solved using robotics.”
FarmGuard was created to scare away deer from crops. Instead of using only a stationary and grounded deterrent such as the noise of a drone, FarmGuard integrates drone noises and lights to scare away deer. This research inspiration allowed the team to incorporate different tools to create a hybrid deer deterrent drone. FarmGuard mitigates the problem of farmers' crops being ruined and their resources being wasted towards growing them, making the solution more accessible, cheaper, and reliable to farmers.
“We designed a drone-based deer deterrent system,” Jerez said. "One of the issues brought up was that farmers were facing damage due to deer and pests. We met up with a farmer who brought up the idea of a drone that scares away deer. He gave us some compelling figures, such as 30% of his crops being lost to deer. The best deterrent against them is to build a fence, but it has to be sturdy and tall, and an estimate for 13 acres was around $20,000. We wanted to build a solution that was more available to farmers.”
“If you look at the damage that deers cause to a farmer per year, there is a study that shows 8-10 million cost for damage is lost in the Midwest area,” Temesgen said. “If we can save that, it would make a huge impact for agriculture, especially for a small farmer that depends on raising crops.”
Their drone design earned the Excellence in Small Farms Technology award with a $5,000 prize to support further testing and development of their project on real deer. Thanks to the generosity of the National AI Research Institute for Land, Economy, Agriculture & Forestry (AI-LEAF), the team had the resources they needed to build the drone. The Minnesota Institute of Robotics also aided with facilities and materials to support these drones.
“At this point, we have all the pieces working separately, but we have not tested the system as a whole yet just because of time limitations,” Jerez said. “We would like to test it on our local contact’s farm and eventually farms of different sizes. When we are testing on larger farms, we’ll have to use multiple drones and segment the area so that different drones are responsible for different areas.”
“My teammates and I felt very supported throughout this process,” Brown said. “Professor Maria Gini, who is our supervisor for this project, was supportive of students interested in research. I had a lot of support from her and Ebasa who led the whole research team last semester which ultimately led into FarmGuard. The computer science department as a whole is high quality with resources and classes, but it really boils down to the people that are there to support you. Thanks to them, I feel that I learned a lot through schooling and this project.”
Learn more about the team’s project by checking out their project website.