Frontier Fellow 2024-2025: Sam Leveau
Title of Research Project: “The Future of Organic Farming: Advancing with the Amiga AgroBot“
Summary:
Sam is an undergraduate student majoring in robotics engineering and minoring in electrical engineering. His project is based on a small electric tractor (Amiga) aimed at restructuring conventional agricultural practices and promoting climate-friendly organic farming. The project seeks to address challenges such as labor shortages, time-consuming processes and pesticide usage prevalent in conventional agriculture. These will be performed by improving existing and developing new functions of the Amiga tractor, which will be also applicable on other similar platforms.
In this project, Sam will work on software development for human-following navigation, replay in reverse functionality, and a mobile device application for remote tractor control and interaction with it. At the same time, Sam will engage with the farming community in Santa Cruz through the Center for Agroecology and gain perspective on the adoption of autonomous technology for organic agriculture. Sam’s faculty advisors are Professor Dejan Milutinović and Dr. Darryl Wong.
