SIU engineering students Curtis Shuman and Cameron Schwartzberg, left and right, look over the soybean plant-inspecting robot they designed and built for their senior project under the guidance of Chao Lu, center, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. The prototype robot uses imaging systems and a future AI system that would examine and track the plants, diagnosing any disease issues and ultimately predicting yields. (Photo by Russell Bailey)
January 23, 2025
SIU engineering students create robot for crop inspection
CARBONDALE, Ill. – The days of a farmer wandering a field and inspecting the crops may be coming to an end, as two engineering students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale have designed a robot to monitor soybean plants as they are growing.
Curtis Shuman and Cameron Schwartzberg built the robot as their senior design project under the guidance of Chao Lu, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Justin Pol, assistant professor of practice in the School of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering. The prototype involves both hardware implementation and software programming that would examine and track the plants, diagnosing crop conditions in the future.
“The project highlights the ingenuity and dedication of our students as they tackled real-world challenges facing modern agriculture,” Lu said. “We hope this success will inspire more students to enter STEM fields.”
Students in SIU’s engineering programs are required to complete a senior design project to graduate. The project requires them to identify an existing problem and then design and fabricate an engineering solution to it.
Shuman and Schwartzberg’s project, funded by an $18,000 seed grant from the SIU Soybean Center, took about four months to design and another four months to build, with the students dedicating about 500 hours total to the work over two semesters.
The pair knew the robot needed to meet several requirements to be successful. First, it had to be able to transit a rough soybean field sure-footedly without damaging crops. It also needed to last for five acres on a single charge while also taking pictures. And although their prototype relied on human remote control, the design needed to accommodate plans for a fully autonomous operation in future models.
Shuman focused on the robot’s physical and electrical systems, finding one of the biggest conundrums to be size restrictions.
“This is a small format bot, just 10 inches wide so that it can fit between 15-inch rows of plants,” Shuman said. “That meant that building space was tight, and bolts and fasteners were hard to get to.”
The brains of the robot – its software – fell to Schwartzberg, who knew it would be a challenge even though his early work in a virtual environment seemed to go smoothly.
“I ran into the normal faults you run into when programming,” he said. “But when it came time to integrate the software onto the robot, I had a lot of issues with the original operating system we had planned to use.”
Ultimately, the pair switched out the hardware’s recommended operating system, which helped it host its own Wi-Fi signal for control, employ GPS in the correct format and run all the cameras to take pictures at the same time, reducing the input lag and the amount of system freezes.
Along the way the pair learned a lot about programming languages, planning, limiting project scopes, making adjustments along the way, controlling costs, time management and other factors that go into real-life engineering. The students also will attempt to integrate AI with future models of the prototype.
“Everything you do, every decision you make, has consequences, some good and some bad,” Shuman said. “All of them affect what you can and can’t do when something needs to change.”
Schwartzberg said he plans on securing employment following graduation this spring. He said the project provided valuable experience that will help him greatly as he enters the world of professional engineering.
“My degree and these opportunities have given me the experience I need to distinguish myself among other job candidates,” he said, adding that working with the SIU Robotics Club also helped him develop the skills he needed to complete the senior project.
Schuman, who also graduates this spring, has accepted a position with Caterpillar Inc. in its Electrification & Energy Solutions (E&ES) Division. He’ll be working on electrifying equipment while making it more efficient and greener.
“I'll be using a lot of the skills I learned on the robot when it comes to power management, power requirements and doing things electrically that have been traditionally done with diesel engines,” he said.