Robotic tractor project earns U of R students $50,000 prize
The world of farming has changed immensely over the past century, and while tractors have become much more advanced, a farmer still needs to sit behind the wheel. For now. That could change soon, thanks to the robotic tractor created by Sam Dietrich, Joshua Friedrick and Caleb Friedrick, a team of University of Regina students.
Their robotic tractor was the culmination of months of work, which paid off when the team earned the top prize at the 2016 agBOT Challenge in Indiana last week.
“It is a competition to encourage innovation in agriculture and robotics. The hosts felt there was a void of robotic applications in the agriculture realm,” said Joshua Friedrick.
Tasked with planting a dozen half-mile rows of corn, the team competed against 11 other teams from around North America.
“There was so much to do and there were a lot of things that could go wrong,” Friedrick said. “It turned out in our favour that the bad things that happened to other teams, happened to us early on and that allowed us to work on the problems beforehand.”
The students, who have graduated from the U of R’s industrial systems engineering program, plan to enter again next year.
“We are looking at future developments as far as robotics and agriculture go,” Friedrick said. “We hope this will be a continuing project at the university and we hope to submit a team next year.”
A fourth member of the team, Dean Kertai, also helped on the project as an industrial adviser.
“He was the needle that brought it all together,” Friedrick said.
As for the tractor itself, it will be available for future U of R students to work on.
“It will be something the university will be looking at for a bit and, hopefully, future students can work with it and continue to develop it,” Friedrick said.
The team’s supervising professor, Mehran Mehrandezh, is proud of their work.
“I was very excited about this. We stood first and it was really exciting for us,” said Mehrandezh, who introduced the students to the project. “I picked them because they came to me about the possibility of using UAVs. That was the start point, which goes back to August of 2015.”
Saskatchewan was well-represented at the competition. Nathan Muchowski, a former U of R student, earned third place for his robot. “Growing up on a farm outside Odessa, I saw first-hand the technological advances in agriculture through the years,” Muchowski said. “When I designed my agBOT, I was preparing for the future. I am very proud of what we were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.”