Hyderabad: Agribot developed by IITians to make life easy for horticulture farmers

After seeing the struggles of the farmers, the researchers at IIT-H, Praveen Chandrahas and Praveen Tammana developed the Agribot which was the cynosure of all eyes during the Innovation Day-2024 held at IIT-H

Sangareddy: To cut labour costs and make the practice of agriculture easy for small and marginal farmers, innovators at the Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad (IIT-H) developed an Agribot that can be used for harvesting vegetables, spraying pesticides, and removing weeds in horticulture crops in particular.

After seeing the struggles of the farmers, the researchers at IIT-H, Praveen Chandrahas and Praveen Tammana developed the Agribot which was the cynosure of all eyes during the Innovation Day-2024 held at the IIT-H campus on Monday. The researchers put up a prototype of the Agribot on display during the Innovation Day.

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Speaking to Telangana Today, Praveen Tammana said that about 85 per cent of horticulture fields in India were operated manually. Due to a shortage of labour and increased spending on labour, many small and marginal farmers could not take up horticulture crops. Since the work was very tedious, farmers and labourers would undergo enormous strain while working in these fields, he said.

Praveen Chandrahas said the Agribot would automatically identify ripened vegetables to harvest them and safely keep them in boxes. It would do the work that ten manual labourers would do in a day. The Agribot would also be useful in spraying insecticide. The sprayer-laden Agribot would identify the parts of the plants which need to be sprayed with insecticides, thus restricting the amount of pesticide used. When the farmers employ drones, the researchers said the drones would spray on total plants which would use excessive pesticides besides causing environmental pollution.

The Agribot would also identify the weeds to remove them by utilising the censor’s AI/ML-based computer vision models. Chandrahas said the Agribot was a work in progress and would be further improved before going for commercial production