Students design robots to aid agriculture at IIT-Bombay

MUMBAI: Robots that can sow seeds in a farm, robots that can remove weeds, robots used for fertilizing crops and robots that can even pluck fruits from trees and accumulate these at one place — these were some of the finalist entries at the e-Yantra Robotics Competition 2013 (e-YRC 2013), which was held recently at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay ( IIT Bombay).

The theme for this year's competition was 'Urban Agriculture'. Agriculture is a major industry in India contributing to over 15% of GDP and employing 50% of the workforce. India has been self sufficient in food production for more than a decade - however there are problems faced at every stage of food production, which lead to insufficient produce as well as wastage of food grains. "eYRC-2013 aims to bring awareness to problems in the agriculture domain by assigning themes that involve processes in this vital domain. Four themes are used as exemplars of important stages in the agriculture production life cycle: seeding, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting. Student teams from around the country have worked on prototypes of robots such as the seed sowing robot, weeding robot, fertilizing robot and fruit plucking robot," informed Prof. Kavi Arya, Principal Investigator, Project E-Yantra.