BitBots Bin-Air-y
BitBots Bin-Air-y - The one aerial solution for surveying, inspection, agriculture & delivery needs. With easily swappable modules, it’s completely autonomous & can take-off & land from anywhere.
Created on 21st March 2021
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BitBots Bin-Air-y
BitBots Bin-Air-y - The one aerial solution for surveying, inspection, agriculture & delivery needs. With easily swappable modules, it’s completely autonomous & can take-off & land from anywhere.
The problem BitBots Bin-Air-y solves
India being an agricultural powerhouse, farming plays a very important role in the country’s economy. We are trying to restructure the current farming techniques to bring up large changes in the farming techniques, to assist farmers to boost their quality and quantity of produce by taking into consideration their land and climatic conditions, market requirements and viability of growing a certain crop based on their income. This is one more endeavour to provide the farmers with the advantage of technology.
We are also using our system as a multi-use solution to use it for surveillance, deliveries and much more use cases which may require efficient aerial solutions.
Industries such as oil and gas mining can use our system to survey and inspect areas that are risky for humans and can also survey large pieces of land at a fast pace without any human interference.
We are looking at using our product in border surveillance, forest and wildlife monitoring, disaster management, mining, construction and real estate, industrial inspection, oil and gas pipeline inspections, agriculture and deliveries.
Challenges we ran into
The first challenge we faced was finding an efficient aerial system that could fly long distances and hover if required. The tail-sitter solved many of our problems by having the ability to take-off from and land anywhere, hover mid-air and have unparalleled efficiency by having the ability to fly for really long distances.
Another problem we faced was interfacing the NVIDIA Jetson Nano with other devices to control various mechanisms like payload release and the sprayer. The I2C protocol came to our rescue as it is a 4-wire solution and could work with many breakout boards.
To establish communication between the Jetson and the Pixhawk, we needed special protocols like MAVLink. Unfortunately, we could not find a proper solution for this.
One other challenge was the heating up of the Jetson Nano overextended workloads, the Nano started to heat a lot, so we added a fan to actively cool the board and we saw a little performance improvement.
Even though the Jetson has a 128 core Maxwell GPU, it wasn’t very powerful to perform complex tasks, hence we used IBM Q and IBM Watson Studio which was really handy in performing the tasks as stated above.
IBM Q the quantum computing unit of IBM which helps lot of developers in various deep learning tasks which helped us a lot.
Technologies used