The world population will reach 10.4 billion by 2100. Because of this, agriculture will become more important than today to support the population increase. But agriculture needs to be environmentally conscious. This study will investigate reducing carbon footprint in agriculture with underground robots and particularly by advancing the concept of agrowormbots. The agrowormbots are robots that imitate a worm and are used in agriculture. The agrowormbots must leverage biomimicry, imitating how nature keeps balance in the surrounding ecosystem to allow an environmentally safe agriculture. Battery, waste residuals, and how to identify a plant are some problems we had tried to solve. As our agrowormbots were underground, some of these problems became difficult. We had to research what solutions exist currently in the academic world. In some situations, we have explored new ideas to map the existing research to our agrowormbots. Once we got to a plan, we started to design our agrowormbot robot and write the coding rules, that we thought were important, for the Arduino motherboard.
INTRODUCTION
According to the United Nations study (United Nations, Population, n.d.), the world population is projected to reach 8.5 billion in 2030. It will increase to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion by 2100. Sustainable agriculture has a significant role in feeding the growing worldwide population and reducing the impact of climate change. Today, agriculture contributes to approximately 30% of greenhouse gas emissions due to chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and animal wastes (IAEA, 2016). Currently, the research community is trying to find many ways to reduce carbon footprint, including in agriculture (Horowitz & Gottlieb, 2010).
In the past 2022 Thames Valley Research Fair, we have researched how to use robots in agriculture. As part of our study, we have introduced the term agrowormbot: It is a robot that mimics a worm used in agriculture. Worm robots are not new concepts as there is already existing research in this domain, for example, Meshworm (from MIT University; Seok et al., 2013) or the soil-swimming-robots that sense the soil properties (from Cornell University; Ramanujan, 2020).
This study will continue to investigate how to leverage agrowormbots to reduce the carbon footprint generated by agriculture.
Sustainability & Biomimicry
Sustainability means the ability to remain at a fixed rate or level. Sustainability in agriculture is the efficient production of safe, high-quality agricultural products to protect and improve the environment, and the social and economic conditions of the farmers, their employees, and local communities. It protects the health and welfare of all farmed species (Betts, 2015).
Biomimicry means the imitation of life and organisms. In agriculture, biomimicry allows us to create balance in nature - for example, we can artificially increase the population of predators when prey is in excess.
In this study, we will look to advance the design of agrowormbots by leveraging biomimicry to improve agriculture and reduce the carbon footprint.
There are many current ways to reduce the carbon footprint in agriculture - for example, implementing conservation tillage strategies, reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer in the crops, and so on. Governments of the world are offering incentives to help farmers to implement climate-friendly activities to fight climate change.
One way that the agrowormbots would perfectly fit the narrative is due to the nature of their engine. Because they operate underground, they cannot use fossil fuels such as gas or diesel. It is because of various aspects, such as no room for exhausting the carbon monoxide due to combustion, space limitation (to have a gas tank will require a lot of space), and limited autonomy (it will require a lot of gas/diesel to perform basic tasks). The engine of the agrowormbot will be electrical. Batteries today give a lot of autonomy and can become very small. We predict the technology will become more miniaturized and provide further autonomy (Masurkar et al., 2018).
Nitrogen frequently increases root growth and foraging capacity for phosphorus. Some of the effects of nitrogen are related to the plant growing and concurrently increasing the absorption of phosphorus (Grunes, 1959).
Why are nitrogen fertilizers bad? Nitrogen pollution causes nitrogen-tolerant species to thrive and outcompete more sensitive wild plants and fungi. It reduces wildlife diversity and damages plant health. Excessive application of synthetic fertilizers acidifies soils, damages health, and reduces the productivity of soils (Soil Association, n.d.).
There are solutions for alternative agriculture that would reduce the use of nitrogen fertilizers. Some of the options are to leverage residual nitrogen sources. Existing agriculture practices use legume cover crops, alphaalpha (Medicago sativa), clover (Trifolium) and hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) to assist in nitrogen production (Christina Curell, 2022).
We envision agrowormbots as very light, with a minimum required engine. As previously presented, the battery can be miniaturized (Masurkar et al., 2018). The control engine will not require too much room. Overloading an agrowormbot with tasks to use fertilizers or other chemicals will require an increase in size. It needs space for the chemicals that will bring extra weight. It determines more power to be produced by the agrowormbot and an increase in size. As a result, it will reduce the autonomy of the robot.
Agrowormbots do agriculture by imitating worms. They avoid carrying any chemicals required for agriculture, such as nitrogen. Agrowormbots can help plants grow by leveraging existing alternative agriculture options, as presented previously. They can find the plants that are sources of residual nitrogen, by identifying their roots and nurturing them instead of plowing them like the rest of the weed. It will eliminate the need to carry any nitrogen fertilizers and help reduce the nitrogen usage presented previously as bad for the environment.
Identifying a plant by its root is not easy. The roots show less distinctive features that permit identification than above-ground organs (Rewald et al., 2012). There are two categories for the current methods: non-destructive (for example, visual examination of the root) or destructive. The destructive methods are anatomical keys, chemotaxonomic approaches, and molecular markers. Sometimes, the root, of more than one plant individual is commonly found in the same place, making plant identification hard. Current techniques use above-ground criteria to identify the plant taxonomy. The lack of applicable methods for discerning plant taxa by their underground parts stops most studies from addressing rooting patterns or rhizosphere processes. For plants, this is challenging as the knowledge of root anatomy is quite limited. As part of our study, we want to suggest a different approach to identifying plants from below ground. Plants tend to intertwine their roots with other plants, making it hard to understand which are the roots of a plant. We want to take a different approach. Like any living organism, plants eat, grow, and leave residues in the soil. Those residues identify the group of plants.
We believe that each plant/group of plants has its uniqueness of the belowground chemistry in the surrounding soil. It is a different approach that does not harm the plan. The prediction, with Artificial Intelligence, of what a group of plants resides in that region can be very accurate. We understand that plants do not live in isolation but as an ecosystem, in harmony. The agrowormbots will nurture the plants and ecosystem using Artificial intelligence and belowground residues. It is similar to what nature does. Plants live in harmony with their surroundings and not as individual entities.
Having a parasitic plant would change the chemistry of the soil. It will allow the agrowormbot to identify the problem. To solve the problem, it creates conditions for the parasitic plant not to thrive like nature does today.
METHODS & MATERIALS
We developed a conceptual design on how the agrowormbot would interact with the surrounding world (Fig. 1), was based on current solutions that were already defined for the aboveground robots. It was changed to fit the requirements of the underground robots, for our agrowormbots scenarios.
Figure 1: Agrowormbots Conceptual Design
The next step was to identify the conceptual groupings of the decision rules and start defining them. We wanted to translate the decision rules into code and implement them using a microcontroller. The rules are implemented using and ELECOO UNO Project Super Starter Kit for the Arduino motherboard using the C++ version and the sensors available to be integrated with the platform, for example, temperature and humidity. Table 1 describes the work so far. All rules follow a pretty simple pattern: identify facts (or input factors) and map them to the desired outcome, for example, “if inside agrowormbot temperature is more than 25 degrees Celsius, then the engine needs to stop for 5 minutes to allow the agrowormbot to cool down”. The outcome actions were translated into messages on the motherboard’s console, for example, “Cool engine down for 5 minutes”, or “Turn left”.
Table 1: Number of Rules Outcome
RESULTS
Table 2 describes the outcome of our design and research so far. It also shows why leveraging agrowormbots would have a significant positive impact on carbon footprint and is beneficial to the nurture of plants.
Table 2: Agrowormbots Impact Over Carbon Footprint
DISCUSSION
We started with the concept of the worms because worms take care of plans and operate underground. We have studied My Biggest Little Farm (Chester et al., 2020) book at school. There, we came up with the idea to apply biomimicry and sustainability ideas in our research. We encountered many problems, such as identifying a plant by its roots, and waste residuals. As our agrowormbots were underground, some of these problems became difficult. We looked to advance the design of agrowormbots by mapping the existing research to our agrowormbots. In the end, we designed our agrowormbot robot and wrote the rules by leveraging an Arduino motherboard.
We envision that the agrowormbots concept will thrive in scenarios where land is expensive and requires every inch of it for agriculture. In these scenarios, above-ground robots would be inconvenient as operating them takes up space. Agrowormbots will also thrive where space is scarce, for example, hydro-pods on Mars, Moon, or Titan. Consistent visual inspection of the plant’s status is challenging if there is no natural source of light nearby when the farm is underground. Agriculture can still happen when the plants do not have access to sunlight, artificial or natural (Hann et al., 2022). The agrowormbots will be responsible for providing care
CONCLUSION
There are many studies on how to apply robots in agriculture. Most of the applicability is for above ground. This study takes on a different approach. It continues the journey that started last Thames Valley Science Fair with agricultural below-ground robots that mimic worms – agrowormbots. The study recommends new ideas to make agrowormbots a success and limit their impact on nature. Finally, it emphasizes the need to reduce the carbon footprint by imitating nature and keeping a proper balance with the surrounding ecosystem.
REFERENCES
Betts, N. (2015), Introduction to sustainable agriculture. Factsheet. http://omafra.gov.on.ca/english/busdev/facts/15-023.htm
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Grunes, D. L. (1959). Effect of nitrogen on the availability of soil and fertilizer phosphorus to plants. Advances in Agronomy, 369–396. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2113(08)60127-3
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Peter Popescu
I love Chess and Robots. In the fourth grade, I went to an astronomy camp at Western University, where I learned how to write code for robots to move around. That is when I became interested in anything related to robots. I also like to help my mom with her beautiful vegetable garden and learn about eco-agriculture. In my elementary school, I ran the local chess club and organized the tournaments.
Paul Popescu
I am an outdoor person who also loves playing soccer with my friends. I love music and enjoy playing piano and trumpet. At home, I help my mother with her vegetable garden and also spend time building and programming robots to move around and avoid obstacles.