MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name

Agri AI

One-line solution summary.

Agri AI helps you to make your food with your favourite agricultural-produce with the lowest impact possible on plants, animals, humans; making our Earth safe again!

Elevator pitch

What is your solution?

Agricultural protection is a significant risk for all industries, every year billions of hard-earned money are lost due to crop losses due to pests. Agri AI is a solution, combining Artificial Intelligence and Embedded Deep Learning technologies to help fight crop loss with precision, speed and scalability in addition to minimising the use of chemicals.

As more and more pests become resistant to the chemicals used in insecticides and pesticides, the need for new methods of pest control is dire. Agri AI is proud to offer the first AI-based product that combines software and hardware together to perform rapid detection and prevent damage at the edge.

By combining state-of-the-art software such as Google's Tensorflow, Edge Impulse' EON Tuner, Docker, Balena.io's Fleet Management and superbly powerful ARM-powered hardware from Raspberry Pi we're not only making a superbly effective pest detection system but a very cost-efficient and user-friendly one!

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

In modern Agriculture and Forestry purposes, Plant Pathological Research is very much essential for crop improvement. Every year, a huge crop is damaged by a pathogen attack. In most cases, Farmers and laymen suffer huge losses due to severe pathogenic infestation. For crop improvement, the first and foremost essential key point is disease identification. In most cases lab oriented research is time taking and very much expendable but instant identification of plant diseases with their causal organism by using modern technology is most suitable and cost-effective and also authentic. This type of identifying methodology will help us to identify the diseases with its proper control measures with up to 95% accuracy.

In general, the impact of pesticides consists of the effects of pesticides on non-target species. Pesticides are chemical preparations used to kill fungal or animal pests. Over 98> of sprayed insecticides and 95% of herbicides reach a destination other than their target species because they are sprayed or spread across entire agricultural fields. Runoff can carry pesticides into aquatic environments while wind can carry them to other fields, grazing areas, human settlements and undeveloped areas, potentially affecting other species. Other problems emerge from poor production, transport and storage practices. Over time, the repeated application increases pest resistance, while its effects on other species can facilitate the pest's resurgence.

Thus we can conclude that even though pesticides and insecticides are pretty useful but nowadays the reverse of it i.e. harmfulness is getting increased at a swift rate.

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

The global agriculture market is expected to grow from $9602.79 billion in 2020 to $10181.92 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6%. The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges. The agriculture market is expected to reach $13133.95 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 7%. The world population is growing and is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. An increase in population creates more demand for food. According to "The Agricultural Outlook" by the OECD and FA0 published in 2018, global cereal production was projected to increase by 13% by 2027. Crop production, farming activities and trade volumes will have to increase in order to meet the need of the increased population, thus increasing the usage of pesticides and insecticides in crop production. Agri AI will not only help out the farmers but will help out the crops and more than 200000 human beings to die due to excess usage of chemicals, alongside preventing more than 600 million animals to die from over-usage of pesticides.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

We've conducted surveys amongst our local farmers and agricultural industries, we've described to them what can our product actually do and how does it help them. We've carried out brief testing and the product was found to be super effective. During our visit to Krishi Vigyan Kendra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), we got to know that about 5 litres of pesticides are sprayed in about 1 acre of land, with the help of AgriAI that can be scaled down massively. We've also portrayed our prototypes to the Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt of India's CSIR (https://csir.res.in) scientists and researchers and they have approved our systems as well!

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Taking action to combat climate change and its impacts (Sustainability)

Our solution's stage of development:

Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution—in other words, what have you accomplished to date?

With the current funds that we've been able to produce a complete prototype version of our project and do field testing of it locally.

Where our solution team is headquartered or located:

Durgapur, West Bengal, India

Team Lead:

Arijit Das