Hyderabad City students design drone to help farmers

Hyderabad: Three best friends Enosh, Saleem and Santosh from TKR Engineering College in the city, driven by passion to ease the hardships of our farmers toiling in the hot sun and manually spraying harmful pesticides and insects, have come up with a unique drone that sprays pesticides in an efficient way.

This innovation has been named as 'Olive Drone' which can fly 5 ft high over agricultural land with a payload of 10 liters and it is a hexacopter that runs on six rotors which can spray pesticides uniformly on one acre land in 90 seconds.

Enosh, who recently demonstrated his innovation at a science exhibition, says it took him years of hard work and he had to spend Rs 6 lakh to complete the design. "Farmers are facing labour scarcity in agriculture industry for spraying pesticides and also people who spray the chemicals are facing negative effect on their health so we want to mechanize this process in fully automated. The trio also rents the drone for Rs 350 per acre.

Saleem says while spraying pesticides or nutrients in the fields, farmers are not able to do that properly by the regular sprayers. Pesticides do not reach uniformly. Some portions of the fields remain dry, while a lot of the chemicals get wasted on the ground. This agriculture drone addresses that problem. "We fix a small camera to the drone for live feedback of spraying to understand if the field is sprayed evenly," said Saleem.

Santhosh, talking about the benefits, says, the hexacopter with a range to fly about 5 feet high will save time, energy and pesticides to the farmers. "The sensors fitted in the drone allow it to spray only when it detects trees and foliage. Therefore there will be no wastage of the pesticide," says Santhosh.

After working on the idea almost for a year, finally their hard work paid off, and they surprised everyone by the recently held T Innovation Utsavam. Speaking of the challenges they faced, they say "During the course of making this drone, we learned new software techniques, assembled hardware and made certain programmes. Every time we were falling short of equipment, it took us more time. We had to order for the equipment online."

Presently, they are modifying this design to prepare it for more competition and bring it to the best levels of efficiency. Looking at the future, Enosh says, the next project is a Hybrid Generator Drone which can replace battery drones and can be used with fuel.

"My further project is planned after observing the financial glitches. many farmers who want to use the drone are not coming forward to buy is because of price. In China, the same drone is sold for Rs 2 lakh and we are planning to sell it India for Rs 80,000."