The Robot that detects Coffee Rust

About

BeanK9 is a quadrupedal robot that uses a flexible robot and machine learning in order to traverse unpredictable terrain and monitor coffee plants for disease. This is adapted specifically for detecting coffee rust, but could be adapted for a wide variety of plant diseases and change how plant monitoring is approached.

BeanK9 is a fourth year engineering design project produced by students at the University of Waterloo.

Our Purpose

The goal of this project was to tackle the issue of the coffee rust, which is a plant disease affecting coffee farms around the world. This disease has been extremely detrimental to the coffee industry, causing over 3 billion dollars in damage from 2012-2017. Currently, the only solution farmers have is to manually monitor their farm all day which is very labour intensive. As such, to reduce the manhours spent and the economic impact of coffee rust on farmers, our team designed a quadrupedal robot with the ability to traverse a coffee farm and monitor it for coffee rust.