Agricultural Robotics 3.0

This project is motivated by FIU’s Senior Project course and the efforts of previous students to work with the FruiTREC project of the University of Florida’s Tropical Research Center. With the ultimate goal of monitoring the development of horticultural characteristics (HC’s) of tropical crops during the use of a new mineral mixture meant to replace fertilizer. 

Assessing the progress of HC’s requires individual attention to crop yields of fruiting trees. These can be very tall and spread across large areas, requiring an excessive amount of manual labor for proper analysis. The use of unmanned drones in HC data collection can decrease required labor as well as providing a safe alternative to climbing trees and interacting with chemicals being tested. Data entry tasks can also be automated and presented in human-readable form to provide in-depth analysis at a level of detail not possible by human researchers.

The objective of this project is to combine these tasks of autonomous data collection of HCs, recording and storing data on a remote server, displaying the data to researchers, and providing an interface for all parts of the system.

