IIT-Madras students create smart agricopter to spray pesticides

Students from the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai have invented a ”smart agricopter” that helps in reducing manual spraying of pesticides in fields. The students have also installed an imaging camera that assists them to identify and fix crop health and status.

The reform will allow sprinkling pesticides ten times quicker and with 100% precision at the equivalent cost as manual spraying.

Students at the Centre For Innovation, IIT Chennai,  recognized manual pesticide spraying as a notably hazardous activity as it threatened farmers’ and laborers’ strength and ended in a massive overuse of toxic chemicals.

The team of three then set out to create a technological answer that would reduce the need for farmers to get in contact with pesticides as well as effectively identify which crops on the farm need pesticides and which did not.

“Agriculture is the backbone of our country, and there’s a desperate ought to upgrade our backbone. we tend to automate a multi-billion dollar manual pesticide spraying business that will use edge drone technology,” same Rishabh Verma, an Aerospace engineering student in the IIT.

The three have additionally filed a patent for the agricopter whose value is predicted to be around ₹5.1 lakh.

What extremely sets agricopter aside from existing merchandise is the multispectral imaging camera. It provides rational analysis of crop health and ensures that the whole spraying method is autonomous, which the farmer isn’t aware of, about the chemical.

“The current version of Project Smart Agricopter may be a hexacopter drone with the capability to hold fifteen liters of pesticides. Agricopter aims to spray pesticides ten times quicker and with a hundred percent exactness at a similar value as manual spraying,” says Kavi Kailash, another Aerospace engineering student.

The team had additionally got a ₹10 considerable worth equity-less funding when their product won the Indian Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP 2.0) University Challenge command at IIT urban center last month.

“Our current challenge is to finish the development of the basic model and work towards testing the potency of their product on farms across the state,” said Akash Anand, Associate in Aerospace engineering.