SIU’s new AI robot designed to protect soybeans from costly disease before symptoms appear

CARBONDALE, Ill. (Heartland News) - As harvest season gets underway across the Heartland, researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale are testing a robot that can spot crop diseases before visible damage occurs.

Many crop diseases stem from soil-borne fungi that spread with rainfall. By the time symptoms appear on stems and leaves, late-stage fungicides are largely ineffective, and yields can drop by 30% to 40%, Billy Ram, an assistant professor of precision agriculture said.

SIU researchers initially tried aerial drones, but the machines failed to capture early infections because overhead cameras could not easily view the underside of leaves or lower plant stems where diseases such as frogeye leaf spot first develop.

To overcome that limitation, the team built a four-wheeled robot equipped with GPS and multiple cameras angled to inspect plants from top to bottom. The unit can navigate fields by itself using uploaded maps to track individual plants, pinpoint infections and evaluate overall crop health.

The goal is to provide technology that farm equipment makers can adapt into tractor and sprayer attachments.

Samuel Singh, a doctoral student in the agricultural sciences program said the team’s next step is training the AI models to recognize early disease patterns, “I want to design maps that help farmers detect hot spots, so farmers can see the hot spots and know what site-specific areas to apply fungicides instead of spraying all over the field.”

Illinois is the nation’s leading soybean producer, home to roughly 43,000 soybean farmers.