Texas A&M University researchers are working to establish a configurable, adaptive, and scalable swarm system consisting of unmanned ground and aerial robots designed to assist in collaborative smart agriculture tasks.
The use of adaptive swarm robotics has the potential to provide significant environmental and economic benefits to smart agriculture efforts globally through the implementation of autonomous ground and aerial technologies. A project led jointly by Kiju Lee, Muthukma Bagavathiannan, in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, and Juan Landivar in the AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi has been funded by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture through the National Robotics Initiative 3.0 program.
“Current trends in precision agriculture and smart farming mostly focus on larger machinery or a single or a small number of robots equipped and programmed to perform highly specialized tasks,” Lee said. “This project will serve as a critical pathway toward our long-term goal of establishing a deployable easy-to-use swarm robotic system that can serve as a universal platform for broad agriculture applications.” For more information, read the Texas A&M Today article.