Growing crops in Nevada and other arid climates can be challenging, but smarter robotic systems could help farmers gain ground.
A new research project at the Â鶹ÊÓƵ aims to help farmers meet those challenges with drones and ground robots that work together to monitor crops and apply treatments. Assistant Professor Parikshit Maini this summer secured a five-year, $618,201 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for this work.
The Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) is the NSF’s most prestigious award for early-career faculty. Maini, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering in 2020 from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, joined the Â鶹ÊÓƵ in 2023.
His CAREER project, “From Fields to Decisions: Planning and Sensing Cooperative Teams of Air and Ground Robots in Precision Agriculture,” could help farmers reduce fertilizer and pesticide use. It also could help agricultural scientists evaluate plant varieties more efficiently.
But Maini says the project’s impact goes beyond agriculture.
“There are foundational capabilities (in the technology) that we’re building in this project,” Maini said. The research can be applied to different situations — defense, infrastructure inspection and even planetary exploration in outer space.
Robotic teamwork
As a field roboticist, Maini designs autonomous mobile robots that operate in the real world. His CAREER project specifically addresses how drones (aerial robots) work with mobile robots on the ground to support agriculture.
“There are challenges to this type of coordination,” Maini said.
One of them is fuel. A drone might not have enough battery power to monitor a large field on one charge. One solution is to have the drone land on the ground robot, which recharges the drone’s battery. But that can be hard to coordinate.
“Let’s say the aerial robot is estimated to consume a certain amount of fuel, but it consumes more, or less,” Maini continued. “Based on that, (the robots) might need to meet earlier than they planned (or at a different location).”
Another challenge is communication.
“If communication (between the robots) breaks down, then what happens?” Maini asked.
A third challenge, Maini said, is task uncertainty. The robots are not going through fields for the fun of it: they have a task, like spraying fertilizer in a targeted spot. The uncertainty here is inherent, because you don’t know how long it might take, or how much fuel will be expended doing it.
If that sounds complicated, there’s more.
Maini’s project also involves coordinated sensing, which is how each robot gathers information about the plants and how they share that information. The drone provides a top-down view of the plant, while the ground robot provides a side view. Those different perspectives provide a full model of the plant, which then can be evaluated for health or other characteristics.
“So many robotics problems exist in this space,” Maini said. “That’s why this is very interesting to me.”
From agriculture to space
Maini’s research is based in computer science, but many of his projects address challenges in agriculture. He’s working with faculty at the University’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources on RoboHydra, a wheeled robot that travels with grazing sheep, providing water, tracking their location and monitoring their health. He also worked on CowBot, a robotic mower for rangelands designed to get rid of weeds, while a postdoctoral associate at the University of Minnesota.
“Agriculture is a very important application, because it directly relates to what we eat,” Maini said.
But his work on robotic systems can be applied way beyond farming. For example, he and Associate Professor Christos Papachristos are developing technologies for new autonomous space worker robots that could build and prepare sites on the moon and Mars for future human and robot missions.
Whether the robots are working on Earth or other planets, Maini’s goal is to advance robotics technology and help future roboticists gain hands-on experience.
One of his first activities after joining the University was to get his graduate students to participate in a national competition, the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ 2024 Student Robotics Challenge.
“I thought it would be a good opportunity for them to learn what it takes to design algorithms and learn the whole process (of developing a robot),” he said.
Students Arif Ahmed, Nathaniel Rose, Ritvik Agarwal and Gaurav Srikar formed Team SARAL-Bot, with Maini as faculty advisor. The group received a best written report citation for its paper, “SARAL-Bot: Autonomous Robot for Strawberry Plant Care.”
Maini also works with younger students through 4-H youth programs, summer camps and school visits. It’s something he will continue doing as part of his CAREER Award. Maini’s plans, according to his grant proposal, also include developing new curriculum at the intersection of robotics, AI and agriculture.
“As a land grant institution, I feel that it is very important that we give back to society,” he said.
