The agBOT Challenge is hosted by Gerrish Farms and Purdue University. The goal of the Challenge is to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in the agricultural technology market. The challenge brings teams together to create autonomous machines to tackle complex agricultural problems including fruit ripeness assessment, selective fertilization of distressed crops and selective destruction of target weeds.
Teams are tasked to create an autonomous machine that will navigate a corn field and identify corn crop and weed. When a weed is identified, the machine should remove the weed through chemical and/or mechanical means. When a corn plant is identified, the machine should assess the health of the plant and apply fertilizer if the plant is deemed to be in distress.
The goal of the challenge is to produce an unmanned, autonomous machine that is capable of collecting soil samples, mapping soil collection, processing the collected sampling and preparing it for storage and diagnostic evaluation.