College of Engineering Unit:
Due to factors such as cost, safety, and feasibility, many in the agricultural industry are turning to alternative methods to crop-dust their fields other than planes. One of these alternatives is the use of agricultural drones. These agricultural drones are the market our project is focused in. Our team has been tasked with the creation of a granular spreader attachment for an agricultural drone. This will allow farmers to spread any dry granular products across their fields via drone. This gives farmers the ability to spread during times of the year were weather conditions don't permit for ground based application. Our task was to deliver our sponsor a working prototype/test rig for their drones by the end of May. The sponsor is Guardian Agriculture, who are based out of Massachusetts and have been working on agricultural drones since 2017. They currently have a drone named the SC1 that can spray crops with any liquid payload. At this time the drone is only capable of spreading liquid payloads. They would like to have a drone with the capability of spreading granular payloads as some of their competitors currently have drone models capable of this. Through the completion of our project, we have delivered to our sponsor a functioning prototype/test rig that they can build upon and ultimately have released to the commercial market to help farmers around the world.
