Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 2 Summer 2019 | 页面 14

14
COVER
STORY
agBOT
Repeat
Autonomous soil
sampler takes first
For the second time in two years, Virginia Tech’s agBOT team came
home from Indiana with a first-place trophy.
The 4th annual agBOT competition, hosted by Purdue University’s Col-
lege of Agriculture and Gerrish Farms was held in West Lafayette, Indiana
May 16-18, consisted of two separate competitions: a weed and seed event
and a competition to design an autonomous system that can collect, store,
and prepare a soil sample for analysis.
The team, made up of 35 students from mechanical engineering, electri-
cal and computer engineering, and computer science, all in the College of
Engineering, were divided into five sub-teams.
Hongxu ‘Howard’ Guo, a spring 2019 graduate and a double major in
mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, was the project man-
ager and overall team lead, said the project was important because soil
sampling is a task traditionally done by humans who introduce errors into
the collection by not having accurate location data and not taking samples
at consistent depths.
ROSAIRE
BUSHEY
MECHANICAL
ENGINEERING
“We created our vehicle to geographically tag sample locations to within
two centimeters and our drill set for a consistent depth,” Guo said. “Also,
traditional soil sampling takes weeks between collecting samples, sending
them to labs and receiving the results. Using our system, it takes about 20
minutes to analyze each sample and results are uploaded immediately to
the cloud.”
Working with faculty advisor Alexander Leonessa, professor of me-
chanical engineering, Guo and the team upgraded the autonomous ATV