Autonomous Agricultural Robot: Is the Machine Uprising Coming Sooner Than You Think?

Innovation and
Reinvention Driving
Transformation
OCTOBER 9, 2018
2018 HPCC Systems® Community
Day
Taiowa Donovan: Robotics Program Director
American Heritage School
Autonomous Agricultural Robot

Who am I ?
• Director of Robotics –American
Heritage School
• Founder and Lead Mentor of Stallion
Robotics Team 5472
• Teacher for the past 18 years.
• Tinkerer
• Robot builder

Who am I ?
Battlebots Builder- 2018 Season
Battlebots-The Discovery Channel
Team Kurtrox: Axe Backwards

Battlebots- Team Axe Backwards

Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Program
Autonomous Agricultural Robot: Is the Machine
Uprising Coming Sooner Than You Think?
HPCC Systems is being used by a team of high
school students to build an autonomous robot for
the agricultural industry to help provide time
sensitive data to a farm management system.

American Heritage School
• We are a private, non-sectarian, co-educational, college
preparatory day school in South Florida with two 40-acre
campuses–one in Plantation (a suburb of Fort Lauderdale in
Broward County), and one in Boca Raton/Delray (in Palm
Beach County), Florida.
• Our schools serve approximately 4,200 students in PK3
through 12th grades, and our student body is top rated in
diversity with students representing over 60 different
countries throughout the world.

American Heritage School-Stallion Robotics

Stallion Robotics

Autonomous Agricultural Project:
Preparing students for an ever-changing future.
As a teacher, I often find myself faced with the ever-
present question… “When are we ever going to use this
in our life?” I remember asking this question many
times as a student. More times than not, I was less than
impressed with the answer.
A project like this one will never be subjected to such a
question!

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Why?
Why do we need to improve agricultural around the world?
• The most common answer is that our population is growing.
This gives us two unique challenges, feeding the growing
population and providing housing.
• The easiest places to build are areas that were traditionally
used for agriculture. Now we are facing shrinking areas for
farm land and increasing demands on the existing area.

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Why?
The challenge of providing food to inhabitants of
this planet needs to be addressed now.
My thought was to propose this problem to my
robotics students and see what we could come
up with

Autonomous Agricultural Project: The Challenge
Gather information
To start our project, we needed to clearly define this
challenge. We started by researching and gathering
information. As a teacher, having students was a great
benefit .

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Research for The
Project
• In preparation for our project, we spoke with Jeff Bradshaw,
CTO at Adaptris / Proagrica, which uses the HPCC Systems
platform in farm analytics.
• This conversation allowed us to focus our efforts and define
the scope of our project with information from leaders in field.

Project
• The students and I visited Duda Farms in Belle glade,
Florida.
• We were also accompanied by a Camilo Gaitan, Professional
Engineer III Senior Water Resources Engineer in the Office
of Agricultural Water Policy Florida Department of Agriculture
and Consumer Services

Project

Project
Challenges facing farmers: What we learned
• Monitoring soil condition
• Pest infestation
• Knowing when product is ready to harvest
• Monitoring growth rates

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Overview
A group of students are working on an autonomous
agricultural project with the goal of providing time sensitive
data to the owner-operator/farmer/grower of a production farm.
Create a robotic chassis that will be able to traverse the
farmland and navigate autonomously to collect:
• Data from the environment. (air temp, humidity, soil temp,
and other environmental factor)
• Soil samples.
• Aerial Data

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Student Involvement
• The project is broken down into
departments.
• Mechanical
(Drivetrain,CAD,3D Printing)
• Electrical (All wiring and
electrical schematics)
• Programming (Big Picture)
• Sensors and Controls (will
work closely together with
programmers)

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Student Involvement

Autonomous Agricultural Project
• Programming
• We decided to use C++ as the main
programming language of the project
• The project also uses Robot Operating
System (ROS) which supports C++
• JAVA for controlling the hardware

• Sensors and Controls
• Our lead student programmer has
decided to use Google’s Cartographer for
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
(SLAM) in the future
• This will make use of the gyroscope,
accelerometer, and the 2D rangefinder to
create a map of the surroundings.
• Ultrasonic sensors will be used to detect
objects and prevent collisions

• Cameras/VR (Virtual Reality)
• Used to provide driver/operator real world view through
VR headsets (HTC Vive) if the desire for hands on
control is there we will look into that for future options.
• The ability to read QR codes to give commands to the
vehicle and provide a frame of reference for object
detection is planned for the next phase
• Both fixed view and 360 degree cameras have been
attached to the robot

Autonomous Agricultural Project: Student
Contributions
• Project Manager- Justin
Schuster
His job was to keep
track of progress and
ensure the successful
completion of the project.

Contributions
• Lead Programmer-
Aramis Tanelus-
Aramis wrote the
program that handles
communication
between the various
sensors and hardware
components of the
robot.

Contributions
Design/CAD- Anthony
Nicotra
Anthony was responsible for
designing and ‘CADding’ the
parts we manufactured for
the project.

Contributions
Electrical- Blake Schwartz
He led the electrical side of
the project and was in
charge of collecting the
electrical components and
wiring the agricultural robot.

Contributions
Machining/Production
Kyle Tanner
CNC machinist for the project.
He fabricated the metal parts
used on the robot
He worked closely with the
Design/CAD leader, Anthony

Future Projects with HPCC and Robotics
• Big Data Analysis
• GPS, Lidar, and Infrared cameras generate big data that
can now be easily ingested into HPCC Systems
• This allows for running Machine Learning algorithms and
doing other analysis on big robotic data using HPCC
Systems
• Opens up more intern projects for students in the future
• This continues to build a strong connection between
robotics and HPCC Systems which will showcase HPCC
Systems as a viable and useful tool for robotics

Autonomous Agricultural Robot: Is the Machine Uprising Coming Sooner Than You Think?

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