It started as a small idea during a brainstorming session:
could we build a robot that helps farmers by separating male and female rapeseed plants in breeding fields? In rapeseed hybrid breeding, workers normally walk through long rows, manually marking the male sterile lines (female lines) and the fertile male lines - a slow, tiring, and repetitive job. We wondered if a simple robot could do this automatically using cameras, a bit of computer vision, and some creativity.
So we began in the most humble way possible: with cardboard, masking tape, and a motor. We sketched a little chassis, built a tiny circuit, wrote a simple program to make the robot go straight, turn left, turn right - and celebrated every tiny movement like kids playing with a toy car. Then came the vision module: a small CNN model that tried to classify rapeseed male and female lines in the field. Eventually, after many small fixes and many laughs with teammates, our cardboard box evolved into a fully moving robot that could actually walk between rows and do its job.
It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t fancy. But we built it together - and for a moment, it felt like the future of sustainable agriculture was walking on four wheels right in front of us.
My teammate after a sleepless night.