I spend most of my free time from engineering activity to find new solutions to enhance green and substainable approach of agriculture to the planet resources.
I have my own farm where I can experiment the solutions and touch the problems of avoiding the methods used in the past to make high yields in agriculture, mostly based on pesticides and other chemical substances. Each year I face a problem that now I have recognized and found a solutions that I started to apply "by hand" just doing this selectively on the picked fruit to see if it is a valid solution.
For agriculture it is a most to pick all the fruits or vegetables at the right time. Later means a lose in quality and conservation or worst if you go bio or green agriculture with no chemicals, then insects get on the crops before you can pick them. I have studied this case for several months during summer looking to insect attacks dynamics on fruits next to get perfect to be caught from tree, and beside my efforts of surveillance, they beat me on time, nothing to do!.
This can be a dramatic problem for those territories with a low growth of vegetables or fruit to feed people because this can shorten the quantity of harvest in the season. Just thinking to places with scarsity of water or few rain that can't ensure a good harvest.
For this project I build a small robot that follows a mapped track, a designed lane (for example made by a contour line), or simply moving along a straigth wire (if plants are in an ordered line).The designed Hardware can be hanged on a drone in order to evaluate the right time to pick up the fruit or vegetables flying over them. This examination of the crops can also give information about diseases or presence of harmful insects at an early stage. The images evaluation by the AI using the internal database stored in memory can shorten decision times on actions to take to contrast diseases and insects attacks on mature crops ready to be collected.
I have faced these problems in my farm and mostly of the times I pick up when is too late, insects where there before! In alternative you can pick them well before but the risk is that they doesn't get mature enough and get waste before, or get mature with low quality in taste and useless to be sold on the marketplace.
Right time to take decisions is important and the use of chemical traps is not enough, my experience show that insects get very smart and avoid them when they understand they are being captured and killed by them.
One only chance: be there before they are there and pick all at the right time arranging for a better yield in agriculture. Up to recent time the massive use of chemical products has altered the ecology state of useful insects versus harmful ones. This caused an always growing demand on solutions from them getting the situation worst and worser. This is most important from countries with a fragile ecosystem and brought to a growing desertification state.
All fruit or vegetables have their own typical aspect and color before getting perfect to be picked from the tree or the soil so it is necessary to collect data, pictures of aspect, weather trend and so on to build something working well, important is also to make a data collection for the recurrent worst insects for that season, typical for any geographical location.
Actually human experience captured by our brain does all these evaluations in perfect way, it is a product of years of application and experience on the field, but what about technology, can it shorten this time ?.
For this reason I think regenerative AI can be worth to challenge this application, of course there is need for a support of hardware and for this purpose I will spend my many years experience to realize the driving vector. I think that Jetson @NVIDIA , the hardware platform choosed can well do the AI part of the project, replacing the way of evaluating many knowledge factors called EXPERIENCE of the farmer, but now replaced by AI.
This will not be easy, nothing is easy but is a great challenge that can solve many problems to agriculture, first of all waste of product due to insects biting the fruits or vegetables that will be useless to be sold on the marketplace or eaten because to much ruined. The biggest step is to identify the solution to a problem then the other steps are spent making an oriented work on it.
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