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. This project is a part of a research collaboration on autonomy of small organic farming between Prof. Dejan Milutinovic, Robotic and Control Lab, and Dr. Darryl Wong, Center for Agroecology, who are Sam’s advisors on this project.
Sam is a member of the UCSC “Electrified Slugs” team, which recently won the 2024 Farm Robotics Challenge “Excellence in Safety” Award. Congratulations to Sam and his co-students on the Electrified Slugs team, as well as to all of the mentors. Please read about this great achievement, including further links regarding this challenge, in this article from November 18th, 2024.
