Filipino studes showcase agri innovation in Japan

Team Agribon, Shell NXplorers 2019 winner, exhibited the creativity and ingenuity of young Filipino talent when it showcased its concept and plans for an AI-powered agricultural drone in the recent 2021 Japan Super Science Fair (JSSF).

The student team from the Philippine Science High School-Cagayan Valley Campus also shared their knowledge in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) with other international students in the two-day event held in Kyoto, Japan. They were a part of a larger group of young talents invited by JSSF to discuss how to build novel strategies and technologies to address urgent challenges caused by the pandemic and global warming.

Jenshiam Balgua, Team Agribon's teacher, spoke of their objective in joining the science fair, "Having been brought to a stage where the students can share their project with their peers, scholars from different schools, and panel experts, is the biggest step for our scholars. It is not just about promoting their project, but also boosting their confidence in [communicating] what they know and what they need, to a larger crowd."

Team Agribon member, Rojan Granado, who handles electronics and programming, spoke of the learnings they received in the JSSF: "During 2/3rds of the science fair, we shared the project formally, and 1/3 was social interaction. There was formal sharing with professors from universities, and there were also mini-breakout rooms where we explained our project in detail with each of our groupmates."

Team Agribon's proposed innovation, an agricultural drone that can water and spray crops with fertilizers, is being developed into a device that can increase productivity among wide swaths of land on Filipino farms. It first got attention in the Shell NXplorers-The Bright Ideas Challenge (TBIC) 2019.

Team Agribon wanted to create an agricultural machine that would cover the entire terrain to help in raising the efficiency in growing crops. They were spurred by the situation in Nueva Vizcaya, where vegetable output kept decreasing for various reasons, including the harsh effect of the rainy weather on the crops, and the mountainous terrain that limited the types of farm machinery that could be used. The common recourse of most farmers was to scatter-spray fertilizers and chemicals on the fields.

Team Agribon instead posed a new solution, a drone with AI vision technology that can precisely target only the areas that need to be sprayed with chemicals.

Currently, the device is a prebuilt model that can follow a preprogrammed path. However, the team is implementing a precision farming method into their drone to better the crop yield and make the farming process more efficient.

The sprayer part will be controlled by an AI system that they developed themselves, accurately controlling the number of pesticides or water given to the plants. Some of the advantages of this process include reduction of farm management costs, lessened exposure of the farmers to pesticides, and reduced risks when farming in sloped areas.

To accelerate the development of Team Agribon's project, Shell funded the purchase of a test drone to test the mechanical parts of the sprayer system. The monies will also finetune the AI into detecting the color of plants and determining the amount of payload to disperse.

Pilipinas Shell and Team Agribon are currently working to build the drone completely and developing the AI software for the sprayer and camera to better discern the health of the plants and give them the substances they need for growth.

Source: TheManila Times