A walk down the field, and along memory lane

I blogged (about a year ago :P) about work at CEERI Pilani, India.

Here is a follow up to that. It was a genuine dream to build a farm robot, I believed that it could actually contribute to a country like India. Moreover it is a serious technical challenge to any engineer, and brings to the forefront some very tough problems in embedded systems, computer vision, robotics and control theory. My continuing obsession with the "3 C's" has always kept me revisiting these problems sometimes through coding or circuit design, or some times as pure idle thoughts. "Sit back and reflect", as the great Hercule Poirot says. Admittedly these idle reflections have taught me a lot and I believe widened my perspective to an extent. I feel its really enriching to try and imagine all the pitfalls that one's design might get trapped into. A good designer I believe, can not only correct design flaws, but also predict and prevent them.

Following is an abstract of the project

"Identification of plant disease is of paramount importance in the greenhouse and plant wilting is a primary cause for loss of revenue in the industry. The need for an automated feature to identify plant anomaly is therefore necessary. The current work describes a farm robot with multiple sensors interfaced to acquire information about various physical parameters of the specimen as well as the environment. Image processing for defect identification utilizes machine vision and neural networks. The robot therefore serves as an efficient method for early detection of plant illness besides helping the user correct any anomalies that may be prevailing in the system. Besides the inherent fore-warning capabilities, it also enables the user to put in place measures to check further spread of any particular plant affliction."

We published our work in Procedia Engineering 2011 by Elsevier. Here are some slides, which I used for presenting the paper in Malaysia. (File upload courtesy opendrive!!, I found this site really useful)

This project is really close to me as it was the true beginning of what has been a wonderful journey as an undergrad student of Electrical Engineering. I sincerely hope that I can keep going along this quest, and who knows, be a part of future revolutions in the information age....