When engineering students are supported in their entrepreneurship ideas, schools and the community as a whole can benefit.
Case in point: a Purdue University College of Engineering student team has started a company to monitor and analyze crop fields to help efficiently determine the need for fertilizer and nitrogen.
Aerial Agriculture LLC uses in-house built drones and multispectral imaging to allow the autonomous drones capture images using a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). This lets agronomists avoid over fertilization and maintain plant health quickly and easily.
"Our technology can pinpoint crop areas that need more attention, which allows farmers to then apply more inputs and address potential crop issues immediately, as opposed to after the fact," said Austin Deardorff, Aerial Agriculture co-founder and a student in Purdue's College of Engineering.
"We expect our clients to get a full return on their investment, if not make money from using our service," Deardorff added.
The team is still improving on their technology, recently upgrading the camera to be able to collect four different spectral bands with increased accuracy.
An example of a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) applied to an image. (Image courtesy of Aerial Agriculture, LLC.)
The company has received funding from various sources through the Purdue Foundry, an entrepreneurship and commercialization accelerator for students, faculty and alumni of Purdue University.
"Purdue Foundry has been an excellent help in getting our start-up off the ground," Deardorff said. "They have provided us with serious resources, as well as massive networking opportunities that you just cannot obtain otherwise."
Supporting student entrepreneurial endeavours is a great way to not only engage new engineers in their studies, but also to allow their new ideas and technological improvements to impact the world at large. Students are constantly coming up with new and innovative solutions to many problems in their communities, though they may lack the resources to bring their ideas to fruition.
With support from schools and affiliated organizations, like Purdue’s Discovery Park and the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, students’ reach no longer needs to be restricted to the classroom or campus.
For more information, visit the Aerial Agriculture website and Purdue University’s College of Engineering.