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AESS Unicauca teams occupy first and second place during the Rover Farmer 2020 innovation competition
The GAESPA and TERRA teams, made up of students and graduates of different programs at the University of Cauca, created two functional robots focused on the Colombian countryside.
The AESS Unicauca GAESPA team won the AESS Rover Farmer 2020 innovation competition, occupying the first place in Colombia with proposals focused on crop fires and low-cost robotics. In second place were the TERRA team, also made up of students and graduates of different academic programs of the University of Cauca.
GAESPA is made up of students Carlos Realpe, from the Master's Degree in Engineering Physics; Paula Grijalba, from Geography of Regional and Environmental Development; Felipe Tosse, from Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications; Luis Gutiérrez from Mechatronics Engineering at Unicomfacauca and the graduate of Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications Germán Morán.
And TERRA is made up of students and graduates of Physical Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications, and Industrial Automation, Michell García, Juan Martín Paz, Camilo Segura, Alejandro Torres and, from the Master in Automation, Cristian Tobar.
The innovation competition Rover Agricultor 2020, organized by IEEE AESS Colombia, where groups from different universities and participated both nationally and internationally, raised among its objectives to bring knowledge in robotics to the Colombian field and space, and is based on the construction of a robot created under aerospace standards for agricultural applications, in this year the contest metrics dictated that this robot must plant and monitor an orchard for corn crops from a spatial approach.
In this sense, the first place in the competition was obtained by the KUTH 0320 robot, created by students from the University of Cauca and belonging to AESS Unicauca. “This group managed to create a 100% autonomous robot, guided by GPS, which was integrated with the internet and could be manipulated from a WEB page, it also measured environmental variables with which, according to its measurement, it adapted the land for sowing, carried out the process of planting the crop and detection of fires with alarms in real time”, stated the members of AESS Unicauca.
The second-place Terra team proposed a low-cost agriculture rover and reused materials. The concept is based on smart phones and peer-to-peer communications that allow the reduction of elements and the decentralization of agriculture processes with a view to blockchain and commerce on other planets. In development, it is intended that young people in the academy can learn and improve the designs presented to apply them in space missions and local missions.
According to the AESS Unicauca collective, in this competition that brought together universities from Colombia and Honduras, they ratify their commitment to empower young people through aerospace sciences with two teams in the eagles category, in which the participants are of high educational levels as professionals, masters and doctorates, with their innovative ideas and good robotics construction practices.
With these new achievements, the University of Cauca and its research chapters are positioned at the national level to allow participation in more events for the appropriation of knowledge and technology in precision agriculture, robotics and applied space research.
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Email: aess@unicauca.edu.co