UGA VIPR Program Innovates Precision Agriculture

The University of Georgia’s VIPR program is revolutionizing agriculture through innovative student-led projects. Teams are developing advanced robotics for tasks like weed control and egg collection, alongside pioneering agrivoltaics that merge solar energy with farming.

In the quiet hum of a University of Georgia lab, beneath the fluorescent glow, Nakyia Bessard-Lezin faced a familiar innovator’s dilemma.

A robotic arm, destined to delicately cradle fragile eggs, simply wasn’t cooperating.

Its intended GelSight tactile sensors were too cumbersome, too wide to allow the necessary precision.

For a moment, the meticulous plans of an electrical and electronics engineering major hit a wall.

But instead of conceding defeat, Bessard-Lezin turned not to a textbook, but to her kitchen.

Metal tongs became her improvised tool, a low-tech hack to test the precise pressure needed to handle an egg without a crack.

This seemingly simple act of ingenuity perfectly encapsulates the spirit driving the University of Georgia’s Vertically Integrated Projects for Research (VIPR) program.

It’s a testament to the belief that real-world problems demand creative, often unconventional, solutions, and that the brightest minds can be found at every level of academia.

Since 2017, VIPR has brought together undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in large-scale, multidisciplinary research.

Now, with an expanded focus on precision agriculture beginning in fall 2024, UGA is cultivating the future of farming, one innovative project at a time.

Administered through the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities, VIPR is a global model for collaborative research.

It’s where aspiring scientists don’t just observe; they actively build, test, and redefine.

Through a powerful collaboration spanning the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the Odum School of Ecology, two new pilot projects are taking root: agricultural robotics and agrivoltaics.

The agrivoltaics initiative, under the guidance of Bodie Pennisi, the Vincent J. Dooley Professor of Horticulture, and Jason Schmidt, a professor in the Department of Entomology, promptly moved students from lab benches to open fields.

Their first semester saw them at Silicon Ranch’s Houston Solar Project in Elko, a sprawling 800-acre facility where thousands of solar panels coexist harmoniously with hundreds of grazing sheep.

This wasn’t just a field trip; it was an immersion into a living, breathing model of sustainable integration, serving over 11,000 local households.

They also explored a 7-acre solar farm in Plains, a site where UGA researchers have been meticulously studying the interplay of sustainable energy and ecosystem health since 2020.

“These two sites offered an excellent opportunity for students to visualize how the system works and some of the challenges and questions we are trying to address,” Pennisi observed, underscoring the critical need for a grounded understanding of such complex systems, not just scientifically, but socially.

Agrivoltaics, the pioneering practice of co-locating agriculture and solar energy production, is more than just a clever idea.

It’s a pragmatic solution aimed at optimizing land-use efficiency, providing farmers with crucial additional revenue streams from renewable energy, and even fostering new opportunities for aspiring agriculturalists.

Research has already shown its benefits in improving soil moisture retention and mitigating heat stress for both plants and animals.

Matt Beasley, chief commercial officer at Silicon Ranch, articulated the core philosophy: “There’s a lot of mystery and misconception about the impact of solar.

We believe that land that goes into solar development does not have to be taken out of agricultural production.

We can harvest renewable electrons and agricultural products on the same property.”

This vision is not merely aspirational; the agrivoltaics VIPR team is actively seeking long-term funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, working hand-in-hand with the Georgia Public Service Commission and local utility companies to establish new research sites and field education opportunities for students.

It’s a powerful synergy, demonstrating how innovation can bridge the gap between seemingly disparate industries for collective benefit.

Meanwhile, Assistant Professor Sultan Mahmud leads the agricultural robotics team, tackling a problem as ancient as farming itself: weeds.

In Georgia’s vast cotton fields, weeds are not merely an annoyance; they are a formidable adversary, siphoning off vital water, nutrients, and sunlight from slow-growing cotton seedlings.

Left unchecked, they can decimate yields by up to 90%.

For generations, farmers have waged war with herbicides, but this chemical arsenal has created a new enemy: resistant weed species.

The environmental toll and escalating costs have pushed researchers to the brink, demanding a new approach.

Mahmud, whose work in the Department of Plant Pathology focuses on precision crop protection, is supervising a student team designing an autonomous weed-pulling robot.

Their goal is profound: to drastically reduce reliance on chemical weed control while simultaneously minimizing the soil disruption caused by traditional mechanical methods.

Rhys DeLoach, an agricultural engineering major on the team, highlighted the downstream consequences: “Poor weed management during harvest can slow down operations by causing mechanical issues with cotton pickers and introducing weed debris that degrades fiber quality.”

The stakes are undeniably high, with cotton contributing a staggering $1.3 billion to Georgia’s economy in 2024.

The robotic solution, built on the Husky A200 unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) platform, promises a future where machine vision precisely distinguishes weeds from cotton, and robotic arms delicately pluck the invaders, offering a high-tech, sustainable alternative to an age-old struggle.

The same principles of automated image analysis are being applied to another critical challenge: plant disease detection.

This VIPR sub-team is focusing on rose rosette disease, a growing threat to Georgia’s beloved roses.

Using thermal imaging and machine vision, students are striving to detect the disease even before visible symptoms emerge, a crucial head start against a virus spread by microscopic mites that ultimately leads to distorted growth, excessive thorns, and plant death.

Data collection at UGA’s Trial Gardens revealed promising temperature differences between infected and healthy plants.

To streamline this process, the team built a small, omnidirectional robot, equipped with thermal or RGB cameras, capable of navigating tight spaces and low-lying foliage.

“It’s been exciting to build on past work and apply computer vision to a real-world agricultural problem,” said biological engineering major Naman Kumar, envisioning a future where farmers can act faster and more decisively.

The third agricultural robotics sub-team, under Assistant Professor Guoming Li of the Department of Poultry Science, is devising a robot to address a costly problem in commercial egg production: floor eggs.

These mislaid eggs, common in cage-free systems, are highly susceptible to contamination and damage, creating food safety risks and reducing efficiency as workers manually retrieve and inspect them.

An automated system could continuously monitor barns, quickly locating and collecting these eggs, minimizing contamination and reducing human traffic, which in turn improves flock welfare.

The challenge lies in precision: grip strength must be meticulously calibrated to avoid crushing or dropping eggs, and depth perception and object recognition must be flawless.

Here, Nakyia Bessard-Lezin’s innovative spirit resurfaces, her modified kitchen tongs serving as a prototype retrieval arm.

Mechanical engineering major Wissam Fekir is concurrently refining the robot’s egg-sensing capabilities with a specialized RGB depth camera.

Satchit Seth, a computer systems engineering major on the project, noted, “Integrating machine learning with precision agriculture practices allowed the robotic system to adapt to varying environmental conditions, ensuring reliable performance in detecting eggs scattered throughout the facility.”

The transformative power of VIPR extends beyond the technical innovations; it reshapes perspectives.

Angilbert Baraka, a computer science and mathematics major, initially harbored concerns that experimental tools might displace traditional farming methods.

By semester’s end, his view had profoundly shifted.

“As technology becomes more complex, people often think it’s going to replace traditional ways of life,” Baraka reflected.

“VIPR showed me that technology can actually integrate with agriculture in ways that add value.”

Arthur Edison, a professor and GRA Eminent Scholar who helped bring the VIPR concept to UGA in 2016, recognizes the program’s dual impact: providing invaluable undergraduate research experience and meticulously preparing graduate students for their careers.

“I love that VIPR students get a more formalized training rather than just ‘here’s the pipette, here’s this instrument.’

They get context and training in an area they are interested in,” Edison stated.

From improvised kitchen tools to autonomous field robots, from sheep-grazed solar farms to thermal-imaging disease detectors, the University of Georgia’s VIPR program is not just conducting research; it is actively constructing the blueprint for a more sustainable, efficient, and resilient agricultural future.

It’s a dynamic ecosystem of learning and innovation, where the next generation of scientists and engineers are not just solving problems, but reimagining what’s possible.