A group of UWinnipeg students spent the month of May learning how to program and control robots that could one day be deployed in farmers’ fields to seed, weed, and harvest crops.
The students enrolled in a four-week intensive capstone workshop on ROS (Robot Operating System) software. ROS enables computers to communicate with and control devices of any kind, from a real, on-farm tractor to the toaster-sized, four-wheeled autonomous robots used in this course.
The whole thing felt like an agricultural robotics summer camp.
Dr. George Dyck
After four weeks of training, the students gathered in a Lockhart Hall classroom on May 28 to stage a live demonstration of their skills. The day was dubbed an “AgTech Triathlon” (seeding, weeding, and harvesting).
The goal was to successfully pilot the robots through a nine-square-metre coverage path to ‘plant’ virtual seeds. Ambitious teams could also try navigating to weed locations and ‘spraying’ them, or harvesting the crop while avoiding a virtual ‘wet zone’ on the return trip. The robots were tracked by an overhead camera that acts as a GPS, which the robots use to correct their path.
“It gives the students a chance to work through real engineering problems,” said Physics Instructor Dr. George Dyck, who taught the course. “My favourite part was watching students from completely different backgrounds, most of them new to robotics, take an autonomous robot through real agricultural tasks by the end of the course.”
Classes with a hands-on lab component require a lot of collaboration. Dr. Dyck said he was impressed by how readily the students helped each other through unique software and hardware problems.
“The whole thing felt like an agricultural robotics summer camp,” said Dr. Dyck, who was raised on a family farm in Ontario. “These are exactly the people and the skills that the farms of the future are going to need.”
Home to the TerraByte lab and the Manitoba Consortium for Digital Agriculture, UWinnipeg is a leading hub for research in digital agriculture, a burgeoning field of study located at the intersection of computer science, physics, engineering, and biology.
Dr. Dyck, who completed a PhD in Biosystems Engineering last year, is passionate about involving university students in digital agriculture. He wanted to develop a course that starts with a core farmer challenge and breaks down the technology needed to solve it.
Eric Hawley of AGCO Corporation, an agricultural machinery manufacturer, was on hand to watch the students’ live demonstration. AGCO Foundation invested about $27,000 to develop the course, provide equipment, and build networks with farmers and technical experts who drew connections to regional labour challenges and industry best practices.
Matthew Sebastian of PTx, a division of AGCO, contributed a lecture on how autonomous systems like OutRun, designed in Winnipeg, are already helping farmers gain more options during peak labour periods. Jamison Masse of Road 50 Farms lectured on farm labour challenges, including advice on how students can get started designing new technology for Canadian farmers.
“Our mission was to create space for youth to develop technical leadership skills and apply them to solve farmers challenges,” Hawley said. “We look forward to further cultivating expertise in digital agriculture!”
