Dartmouth Engineering Student Applies Mobile Robotics Toward Healthier, More Sustainable Agriculture

Transcript

The current project I'm working on is about increasing the efficiency of agricultural cropping systems. In agriculture, farmers are forced to apply a variety of agrochemicals to their land—so pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizer—and these things are highly tied to rates of cancer, they're expensive for farmers, and ultimately, my goal is to design a better solution for that.

I'm not a farmer, but I do have some understanding of it. I come from the Midwest, I grew up in a rural area, and I want to develop technologies that help those communities. 

In 2022, we actually performed a crop study, and that demonstrated that we could use about 20 percent less nitrogen fertilizer and get roughly 10 percent more yield if we apply the fertilizer slowly over time with a robot. The goal is to get to a point where we can sustainably manufacture and sell these robots to farmers.

Instead of formulating new science around robotics, I'm interested in the applications of mobile robotics in particular—so robots with wheels—and I kind of was looking for a real-world problem to solve. You know, we're kind of facing a crisis in agriculture, and even though I'm a roboticist, I think of myself as an engineer. So that means tackling those big problems. And as our population grows, we desperately need to produce more food that's being produced on fewer and fewer acres every single year. 

The chemicals that we're applying to agricultural land, it's giving people cancer and giving people health ailments, and it's bad for the environment. And we kind of understand all these things, but we don't have commercial solutions to tackle that right now. So that's the big-picture problem I'm trying to address—is developing tools that farmers can use to produce their crop healthier and, you know, get that higher yield that we actually need to sustain our population. 

When I say I build robots, I build robots. I've had a very unique experience in the sense that I've been able to work on every aspect of my project from start to end, and it's enabled me to be, I guess, in some ways, an end-to-end engineer. Not many people get that sort of exposure where they're working on all aspects of the project. So yeah, that's very, very unique. And I've appreciated every single part of that. 

The community of Dartmouth is very rewarding, and people are so eager to share their knowledge and share their research that you really end up learning a whole lot more than you think you would, even when you're not, you know, making that effort.

Faculty advisor: Professor Laura Ray