Kansroo
A small robot drives the furrows, checks crops and reports to the farmer's phone
Improving the productivity of small-scale, multi-variety farmers
- Key fact
- Up to 50Crop types a target farmer grows
- Team
- 7 master students
- Disciplines
- Architecture and Space Design · Business · Communication Design · Electronic Engineering · Industrial Design · Informatics
What happened, step by step.
Challenge
Yanmar asked the team to help small-scale, multi-variety farmers: up to 50 crop types, fewer than five colleagues and under ten hectares. They must monitor crops and manage tasks with very little time.
What the team learned
Farmers travel between plots, and each crop's needs shift with weather and season. Their knowledge lives in their heads, so they cannot delegate easily or spot patterns across seasons.
What they built
Kansroo is an autonomous all-terrain vehicle that drives through furrows. It monitors crops with a camera, tests soil moisture and temperature and carries a weather station. It returns to its charging dock and sends data to an app for scheduling tasks.
Impact
The team's vision is to add machine learning that predicts needs and to pool data that guides farming practice and informs service and product providers.
Full project text
The team’s original texts from the project page.
A multi-channel system designed to increase the production efficiency and productivity of small-scale, multi-variety farmers.
Challenge
To identify problems that small-scale multi-variety farmers’ experience, and develop an innovative user-centred solution that reduces pain points to ensure efficient farming practices and maximising farmers’ productivity.
Solution
An autonomous mobile field robot that monitors and analyses crop health and farming conditions via cameras and sensors to formulate digestible information for farmers via application. The application allows farmers to observe their crops and informative data, schedule tasks, weather forecasting and check previous data to recognise patterns and the effect that their farming actions have on crops.
Impact
Precise data allows farmers’ to make smarter farming decisions to improve crop health and maximise yields. Autonomous vehicle ensures farmers’ can maximise land and time management and can boost overall productivity. Application allows farmers’ to set task and build schedules to ensure they can improve efficient.
Watch the team’s pitch.
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From the field to the prototype.
Who built it.
Liam Tai Olynyk
Business
Josh Bragagnolo
Industrial Design
Natasha Miles
Communication Design
Akimi Ono
Architecture
Hikaru Inoue
Informatics
Masaya Kibayashi
Space Design
Yuki Tamiya
Electronic engineering