Team Agribon, Shell NXplorers 2019 winner, exhibited the creativity and ingenuity of young Filipino talent when it showcased its concept and plans for an AI-powered agricultural drone in the recent 2021 Japan Super Science Fair (JSSF). The student team from the Philippine Science High School — Cagayan Valley Campus also shared their knowledge in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) with other international students in the two-day event held in Kyoto, Japan.
“Having been brought to a stage where the students can share their project with their peers, scholars from different schools, and panel experts, is the biggest step for our scholars. It is not just about promoting their project, but also boosting their confidence in [communicating] what they know and what they need, to a larger crowd,” Team Agribon’s teacher, Jenshiam Balgua said.
Team Agribon’s proposed innovation, an agricultural drone that can water and spray crops with fertilizers, is being developed into a device that can increase productivity among wide swaths of land on Filipino farms. It first got attention and won P50,000 as prize money for its inventors in the Shell NXplorers -The Bright Ideas Challenge (TBIC) 2019.
They were spurred by the situation in Nueva Vizcaya, where vegetable output kept decreasing for various reasons, including the harsh effect of the rainy weather on the crops, and the mountainous terrain that limited the types of farm machinery that could be used.
Agribon proposed a new solution — a drone with AI vision technology that can precisely target only the areas that need to be sprayed with chemicals. Currently, the device is a prebuilt model that can follow a preprogrammed path. However, the team is implementing a precision farming method into their drone to better the crop yield and make the farming process more efficient.
To accelerate the development of Team Agribon’s project, Shell funded the purchase of a test drone to test the mechanical parts of the sprayer system. The monies will also finetune the AI into detecting the color of plants and determining the amount of payload to disperse.
“All the tools we learned in the NXplorers workshop—the feasibility tunnel, the connection circle, the scale quadrant—they were very useful tools because we were really able to narrow down the best options to utilize in increasing the crop yield in the Philippines, in relation to problems in food security,” said Team Agribon member Marein Angela dela Cruz who deals with the project’s agricultural aspects.
Despite the challenges COVID-19 has brought, Team Agribon remained productive since winning The Bright Ideas Challenge in 2019. “I think the main thing that changed is the flexibility in time because of COVID. Free time in the afternoon made it easier for us as a team to convene with each other and discuss what needs to be done,” said Team Agribon member Samantha Marie Gonzaga.
Pilipinas Shell and Team Agribon are currently working to build the drone completely and developing the AI software for the sprayer and camera to better discern the health of the plants and give them the substances they need for growth.
