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Farming Challenge

Autonomous Soil Testing Drone Swarm • Mechanical Engineering Member • 2025-Present

Patent Pending Scientific Journal in Progress MIT Partnership

Project Overview

Team Farming Challenge is developing an autonomous soil testing drone in partnership with an MIT research program to revolutionize precision agriculture for small organic farms. Our system provides farmers with quantitative insights about soil health and moisture levels, reducing water usage and labor by replacing manual soil checking methods.

The innovation is currently undergoing patent review, and our team is collaborating on a scientific journal publication documenting our novel approach to aerial soil sampling. As the mechanical engineering lead, I designed and fabricated the core soil sampling mechanism that enables autonomous depth-profiled moisture measurements.

The Problem

Small organic farms face a critical challenge: current soil moisture assessment methods are inefficient and imprecise. Farmers rely on manual checking—walking fields, digging holes, and using the "hand feel" method to estimate moisture levels. This approach is:

Existing automated solutions either require expensive embedded sensor networks (costly for small farms) or use satellite/remote sensing (limited to top 5-10cm of soil with low resolution). Our drone-based approach fills this gap by providing affordable, high-resolution, depth-profiled soil moisture data across entire fields.

Our Solution: Autonomous Soil Testing Probe

The Farming Challenge system combines autonomous drone navigation with a novel mechanical soil sampling probe to collect quantitative soil moisture measurements at precise GPS-tagged locations across farm fields:

Sampling Device

System Components

Mechanical Design: Aerial Soil Sampling Device

As mechanical engineering lead, I designed the core soil sampling mechanism—the most critical technical challenge of the project. The probe must insert 18 inches into compacted clay soil, collect accurate measurements, retract cleanly without debris accumulation, and repeat this process autonomously while carried by a drone with strict payload limits.

Design Requirements

Our team established rigorous functional requirements and constraints through stakeholder interviews with organic farmers and literature review of soil sampling methods:

Functional Requirements

Design Constraints

Design Process & Concept Development

We followed a rigorous mechanical design process, beginning with extensive concept generation, functional decomposition, and prototype-driven validation:

Concept Generation

Initial brainstorming produced diverse insertion mechanisms:

Throughout prototypes and meetings, we converged on the auger-based design with anchoring spikes and decided on a single motor gear drive system as optimal for reliability, precision depth control, and scalability while not being too heavy for the drone. Although, to find the optimal gear ratio of linear motion and turning of the probe, a two motor version was originally built:

Two motor version

Final Mechanical Design

The production design features a single motor gear driven system with precision lead screw depth control and passive anchoring mechanism:

Key Mechanical Components

Auger Probe Assembly

Drive System

Structural & Guidance

Anchoring Mechanism

Prototype Testing & Validation

We conducted extensive testing of the 6-inch prototype before scaling to the full 18-inch design:

Bench Testing in Controlled Soil

Initial validation used bucket testing with sand, silt, and clay soil samples to quantify insertion force, depth precision, and measurement repeatability:

Prototype testing in bucket with clay soil

Key Testing Results

Impact & Results

Technical Achievements

Technical Skills Developed

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