UG07 – Starwheation

The wheat shortage has been a more significant global concern since the Russo-Ukrainian war. From 2020 to 2021, the estimated losses of wheat leaf rust across the United States increased from around 15 million to 60 million bushels. Thus, this project aims to alleviate wheat rust’s effect in affected countries like the U.S., China, Russia and more. The current difficulty in determining wheat rusts is that the farmers cannot monitor all the crops on a large farm. Wheat rusts could be spread from a single infected plant to numerous healthy plants by spores, and new lesions form within 1-2 weeks. Wheat rusts usually start at the bottom and can be best detected early. This project principle is that using the Arduino camera module installed on a drone, the rust on the wheat’s leaves, stems, and stripes could be recognized automatically using Arduino code. Once the camera sensor detects the wheat rust, the drone will alert the users and send out the graph of the x-y plane of the infected crops’ location by LoRa. After, the drone will treat the infected plants with a fungicide. In addition, infected crops’ information would be disseminated by LoRa to nearby farmers