IIT Kharagpur: Researchers Develop Robot to Treat Plant Diseases; Read Full Story

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have designed a robotic system which can identify the disease of the plant through a camera and accordingly it can spray the pesticides on the infected area directly.

What Can This Robot do?

The lead researcher of the project from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, Prof DK Pratihar said, “Normal human eyes cannot detect the reason of diseases but our designed robot can analyse the images captured by its camera and find out the root cause of the diseases”. 

He further added, “The robot is capable of accessing the need of pesticides according to the need of the plant and can even spray the pesticides from every angle of the plant.” 

This will help farmers to detect the diseases and ways to cure them. Moreover, it will protect farmers from health hazards from pesticides.

The researchers also see this as an advancement in the digitization of the farm sector.

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Mechanism of the Robot

• This robot can be operated on the rough terrain of the field and it is capable of holding a camera, a pesticide storage module, the pesticide spraying nozzles and the camera based vision module.
• This robot takes power from a rechargeable battery which can give a backup of upto 2 hours once fully charged.
• The robot will be operated remotely through a control panel, which is already synced with the robot.

Researchers in IIT Kharagpur said that they will resume the assembly of the robot after the final testing. The duration of the project increased drastically due to the lockdown imposed as a result of Covid-19 pandemic.

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“We have further plans of making this robot equipped with artificial intelligence so that it can be operated on its own without being operated remotely, '' They further added. This will help farmers save time.

This project is said to be the part of Prime Minister’s recent ideology i.e. Atma Nirbhar Bharat. 

The main challenges for this project is to be available for farmers to buy on credit and to be able to operate them efficiently.

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