Weeding Bot

Agriculture is the backbone of the African economy with 70% of its inhabitants relying on it for survival. However, there occur yield losses of up to 200 million metric tons due to weeds. The traditional weed removal has been herbicide but they have many drawbacks including; crop contamination due glyphosate present in herbicides, unaffordability due to high cost of herbicide inclusive of labor and utilities usage such as water and leads to cancer after long use. To combat these problems, we decided to make the Weeding Bot. It is an autonomous mobile robot that makes weeding easy, efficient and most of all safe for the consumer, free from herbicides. It is powered by A.I capable of navigation between crop rows, weed detection with 90% accuracy and weeding elimination using the robotic arm and weeding attachment.

The problem we are tackling is weeds and providing an alternative eco-friendly method to herbicides. There occur losses of up to 200 million metric tons just from weeds. Currently 75% of the worlds produce is made by small scale farmers and it is estimated by 2050 that we will need to feed an additional 3 billion people and that is not possible using the current systems.

 Our solution targets the small scale farmers who make up the majority of food producers and who are not accounted for by solutions to weeding that exist apart from herbicides which are proving to be a costly poison for both the farmer and the consumer alike. A phenomenon that is causing countries like France to ban the herbicides. They contain glyphosate, a compound that has been related to causing cancer.

Our solution is the weeding bot. It is an autonomous mobile robot that is capable of weed detection, weed elimination and navigation between crop rows. This is all possible due the A.I trained using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. The robot captures images of the plants in front of it using cameras. This information is then relayed to the microcontroller that has the A.I. Once the A.I detects a weeds, it actuates the robotic arm to pluck the weeds from the ground. 

From our research we found that cutting weeding is ineffective as the weeds grow back. Plucking the weeds from the ground effectively kills them. When the robot sees a good plant i.e vegetable, it actuates its wheels to move to the next plant.

We are targeting the small scale farmers. There are currently no machinery to help small scale farmers. Most small scale farmers used herbicides. The most popular of them being Monsanto products. The reason we are naming them is because if a farmer currently uses their product to farm, their produce will not be allowed in the international market because they have settled cases in court due to causing cancer and this is huge problem for small scale farmers.This problem is augmented by the rural to urban migration happening mostly with the youth seeking white collar jobs.

Rock and a hard place kind of situation and the weeding bot seeks to give an easy choice in a market that is desperate for a saviour and weeding bot is everything they need it to be if not more.

This is because it is simple to use, efficient in removing weeds from farms, small therefore allowing it to be an economically sound decision for small scale farmers as well as it employs the youth who will feel as if they are employed by a tech farm instead of on a farm.

Using our business model, the farmer while farming only needs to pay our rates for the acres they own and that's it! We take care of the rest. No hustle if not just plain easy.

Herbicides as much as they would kill weeds, they would reduce the productivity of crops. With weeding bot yields grow exponentially. You get what you plant approximately with avery small error(-5%). 

No environmental pollution, no risk to consumer from food produced. Less cost to the farmer, no labour costs to weed farms. Farming in the direction of the weeding could never be simpler. 

Our solution uses an eco-friendly approach when it comes to weed elimination. Our competitors use selective herbicide spraying which still harm the environment. Also, our competitors use large machinery which is not suitable to the small scale farms which produce 70% of the world's produce. Our solution is compact enough to fit on these small scale farms and are far easier to operate and maintain.

Our robot uses A.I trained Microsoft Azure Cognitive services. The A.I has been trained with many images of weeds and various crops such as cabbages. The A.I is loaded onto the microcontroller, the Nvidia Jetson Nano, which does object detection and classification in less than a second. The A.I is also used to navigate between the crop rows effectively and actuate the robotic arm to pluck the weeds from ground. It uses cameras to detect the weeds and the crops. It is powered using battery with a capacity to last 6 hours in the field. Future upgrades will include a better battery and provision for solar power.

The link to the robot working is below;

Weeding Bot Demo

We are currently moving to the pilot program where we intend to get 10 farmers who we will test our model and business model on them.

Our projections suggest this will be successful but it will make sure we satisfy the small scale farmer to the highest extent and give us testimonials for the next stage which will be to capture at least 300,000 farms of the available 800,000 small scale farms in Kenya.

That would give us a platform and inform us on how to capture the next market which will be East Africa, Africa and ultimately the whole world.

We have partnerships such as ministry of Trade that would actually be instrumental during reaching the Kenyan market.

We will make more for expanding to the rest of the region.

Our impact for the next year is pretty humble cause we are more of realists and more if it is just the pilot program setting sail and the improvements that will be informed from it.

For the next five years, we have very ambitious goals.

Employment for the youth which will give them various opportunities: First,is the exposure to the technology used to undertake such an endeavour, this will most certainly motivate and inspire cropping of more innovations; Secondly, the earnings that would spring from the employment would help enrich lives and even save for capital for other endeavours.

For farmers, they will have a reliable source of income springing from the reliability of the weeding bot, not to mention its efficiency. No loss of quality of produce by using herbicides which also kill the crops a little as much as they are killing weeds.

All they have to do is pay for the rates of weeding for their farm and sitback. We handle everything from there. No risk, less costs, less work and more profits from farms.

Consumers, they benefit from eating food that has not been contaminated by glyphosate that is used in most herbicides and has been known to cause cancer.

The environment,  no herbicides which are big environment pollutants washing into even our water.

The governments, when giving subsidies to farmers, are met by corruption that distort their efforts by hoarding. With weeding bot that process can be transparent and consistently monitored.

The pilot program is the biggest challenge we have currently. 

The funding to build 7 more robots and enlisting small scale farmers to commit to the program so that we could monitor our weeding bot model and how it behaves through different growth cycles of the crops. Different as they may be.

Being a new product in the market. Market sensitization will be a big factor when rolling out.

Technically, we always can upgrade a few things wgich we are constantly upgrading.

Cultural barriers do not affect this type of endeavour. No cultural norm is it defying that we know of.

Market barriers are none existent for the weeding bot unless we consider herbicide manufacturing companies which may try to undermine our efforts but that is not an easy feat considering the drawbacks that they are facing currently even with the uproar happening advicating for their banning.

Financial barriers, we are getting into competitions like this that are dedicated to helping, social impactive projects like this see the light of day and change lives all over the world.

The competitions also give us the market sensitization that is much needeed for this product. Once the public see that the specialists believe in this, then we are a step closer to sensitizing the farmers to accept this product on their farms.

We also bear all the costs and risks by our model therefore bew farmers can easily try out the weeding bot without exposing themselves financially by our farming as a service model.

We are currently two people on the team namely;

Michael Malombo Mwaisakenyi - Co-founder

Kenneth Kioria Gicira - Co-founder

The problem of weeding touches home with my grandfather facing huge losses on his farm to a point, he gave up farming as an economic activity and just does it for subsistence. That hurt me and I realized it is a problem affecting very many small scale farmers especially in Africa.

We are ambitious and follow excellence in everything we do. The size of the fight in us is very huge. 

As much as we've just finished school, nothing will stop us from making the world a better place than we found it. 

We are an award winning team who recently won the Microsoft Imagine Cup EMEA Regionals and was also a World Championship Finalist. Our team members have skills ranging from A.I, Machine Learning, Python, Android Development, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, Java, C, C++. We have also participated in local competitions like the Tech Exhibition hosted by the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. We have interacted with many farmers at these competitions and be able to integrate the feedback into product development. 

We have currently partnered with Kenyan Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives who have invited us to present our solution at the Nairobi International Trade Fair, which is the biggest in East Africa. This will provide a platform to interact with many farmers, bringing awareness of the robot.

We are currently using farming as a service model. This is where we do the weeding services on people's farms and charge $120 USD per acre. Given that the average small scale farm size is 5 acres, this will yield an average of $600 USD per farm. This is quite affordable for our key customers who are the small scale farmers.

This model allows us to take all the risk from the farmer and secure their livelihood.

The cost and as low as it looks competing with herbicides, ensures the investors get more than their money's worth because we acknowledge, a good idea is nothing without a good return strategy for the investors.

Making it very lucrative for both parties--Investors and farmers.

We are primarily applying to Solve to seek the funding so that we can develop the weeding robot further and launch our pilot program successfully. By developing the best version of the robot and having a successful pilot program, we are sure we will be able to tackle the weeding problem head on and guarantee great yields for farmers that are usually robbed due to weeds. This will ensure the small scale farmers who are our target, will have an alternative eco-friendly method to eliminate their weeds effectively.

We would like to partner with MIT faculty especially the Mechatronic Engineering department. This is because we regard MIT as being the best in regard to engineering practices. We are sure will learn a lot from the faculty and will help us in making a premium quality weeding bot with high global standards.

By taking on weeds which is a big problem to the Agricultural space in the world, we will be solving a big issue that will become even bigger in future. From our research, we have seen that by 2050, the Agricultural industry will need to feed an extra 3 billion people and that will not be possible with the current food production methods. By returning the yields that farmers are usually robbed from weeds, we will be enhancing the agricultural produce capabilities of small scale farms who produce majority of the world's produce.