Swarm Robots: Crop Land Expansion to Marginal Land
The marginal land, such as highly sloped and uneven terrain, precludes farming with conventional agricultural machinery or tractors. On sloping terrain, tractor rollovers are frequent, and around 100 farmers are killed annually in the US. In great plains state, around 11.6 Mha land is currently under 6 to 25°, which is unsuitable for farming with large conventional agricultural machines and left for cattle grazing. Therefore, we proposed a fleet of autonomous ground vehicles to perform essential agricultural operations on slopes. I worked on multiple components in this project, as shown in the figure. More details can be found in my Ph.D. dissertation:Robotic Farming on Marginal, Highly Sloped Lands
*This research is supported by USDA NIFA, under the National Robotics Initiatives- 2017.