KrishiMitra: Har Kisan Ka Sacha Sathi

Description

KrishiMitra is a “student-built agri‑tech innovation” designed to reduce the heavy crop losses Indian farmers face due to late disease detection and blanket pesticide spraying. Farmers often treat entire fields without knowing which plants are actually sick, which wastes chemicals, harms soil and water, and increases health risks.​

Our prototype shows how AI and robotics can change this. A USB camera sends images of tomato leaves to a laptop, where our self-developed deep learning model classifies them as healthy or diseased in real time. When infection is detected, the laptop sends a command to an Arduino on the robot to control motors and a medicine pumps, which sprays the required medicine only on the infected area, demonstrating targeted spraying and reduced pesticide use compared to conventional methods.​

Right now, this setup depends on a nearby laptop, which is not ideal for real farms. To make KrishiMitra a field-ready product, we want to move from a tethered prototype to a smart, connected robot with its own on-board computing and digital tools for farmers.​

Your funding will support three major upgrade directions:

• On-board Intelligence: Purchase a Raspberry Pi and high-quality camera, and optimize our AI model so it runs directly on the robot without needing a laptop, enabling fully autonomous disease detection and decision-making in the field.​

• Robust Hardware & Sensing: Build a stronger all-terrain chassis with improved suspension, add low-drift spray nozzles, and integrate sensors such as soil moisture, temperature–humidity, and light intensity to monitor crop conditions continuously.​

• AgriSetu – Our Digital Platform: Develop AgriSetu, a companion website where farmers can log in to see basic analytics from the robot: disease alerts, spray history, simple health scores, and sensor trends, along with educational content on safe pesticide and sustainable practices. Future versions can also support multi-crop models, multi-language support, advisory and legal tips, and integration with SMS or WhatsApp notifications, etc.​

With these upgrades, KrishiMitra will evolve from a laptop-based demo into a connected precision-farming system that combines a smart robot with an easy-to-use digital interface, supporting sustainable agriculture and UN SDGs on food security, health, responsible consumption, and climate action