In the AIIRA national AI institute, Prof. Soumik Sarkar (Mechanical Engineering) and Prof. Asheesh “Danny” Singh (Agronomy) at Iowa State University leverages ARA to investigate how networked agricultural ground vehicles, remote sensing and computing, and machine learning can automate labor-intensive field scouting—transforming hours of manual assessment into near-real-time analysis and decision-making.
Traditional field scouting and crop phenotyping are both time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this challenge, the team is developing an integrated platform (shown in the picture below) that combines a highly customized, field-deployable “Amiga” platform (Bonsai Robotics, San Jose, CA), which can be equipped with a wide range of sensors such as high-resolution imaging sensors, with an automated navigation system, an ARA communication user endpoint, and a high-performance computing unit. Together, these components enable automated data collection, fast model training, and data-driven actuation decisions directly in the field.
The ARA wireless living lab plays a key role in this initiative. The custom ARA communication endpoint developed for the Amiga robot delivers the throughput, coverage, reliability, and low latency needed for real-time video streaming, data collection, and edge inference, which is in sharp contrast to the unstable and intermittent connectivity commonly experienced in rural farm fields today. Joscif Raigne, a PhD student who manages and operates the Amiga experimental platform, shared his enthusiasm: “The sky is the limit for agricultural applications when unmanned vehicles, field sensors, and computing servers are interconnected through next-generation, reliable, high-performance networks.”
The Amiga platform was featured as a plenary demo at AraFest’24. Videos of the presentation and demonstration can be found here. Currently, the team is expanding the pilot to include other types of unmanned agricultural vehicles, such as scouting drones and sprayer drones, for precision weed control and other farm applications.