Did you know Salt from the Aral Sea is found in Scandinavia and Antarctica?
Do you know how many people suffered from the consequences of the ecological disaster in the Aral Sea?
More than FOUR MILLION people live in the ecological disaster zone, which covers a significant part of Uzbekistan and the southern part of Kazakhstan, 40 million people live in the Aral Sea basin.
The effects of human activity have changed the composition of the water. The salt concentration increased 10 times (1), and the salt concentration in groundwater reached 6 g / l. This is 6 times (!) The concentration that the WHO considers safe.
Moreover, traces of Aral salt have been found in such remote regions as Scandinavia and Antarctica. Annually, about 150 million tons of toxic salt is carried from the bottom of the Aral Sea for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
The Aral Sea and millions of people need a solution!
One of the solutions to this is the creation of forest plantations at the bottom of the Aral Sea.
Since 2019, saxaul seeds have been planted on the dry bottom of the Aral Sea. This process is carried out in several ways:
with the help of tractors and human hands;
seeds are sprinkled from planes.
Since these processes take place during the winter months, they require heavy human labor. And a lot of resources are required.
This is why my team and I are trying to create an autonomous solar-powered saxaul growing machine. Below I give a link to the 3d model of the car that we are creating, and a video of the car body that we are creating. We faced a number of problems. We need help. The machine we have created must move through the holes dug by these two tractors.
We need a camera using software and artificial intelligence devices or a GPS system to help us navigate between these two depths.
What devices or platforms can we use?
I saw the Acorn robot on Youtube. Acorn also used GPS recognition. What advice can you give us? Thanks in advance for your answers!
The YouTube link is broken for me in Canada. It shows “This video is unavailable”.
Probably dumb question - since a tractor is required to dig holes anyway, and from the picture people just follow the tractor to plant, why not just design the planting machine as a trailer of the tractor to avoid the hassle of having to navigate?
If that’s not possible, since the tractor leaves very regularly shaped continuous trail, wouldn’t it be easier to just follow the trail and identify holes?
These tractors dig holes. Fertile sands are collected in a dug hole. Then seedlings are planted in these holes. Sorry it was an old photo above. Tractor trailers are currently being used for planting seedlings, as you said.
After a day or two, the tire mark disappears. The excavated areas are covered with sand. The reason is that the bottom of the current Aral Sea is covered with sand. Lands often change their appearance.
Sorry I misinterpreted my project. The purpose of the machine we are creating is not planting saxaul seedlings, but planting saxaul seeds.
Saxaul seeds:
(A) Saxaul tree stand view, (B) Young tree, (C) Mature tree, (D) Stem, (E) Seedling, (F) Assimilating shoot and fl owers, (G) Ripen seeds of H. ammodendron.
The seeds are very light. From 2019 to the present, saxaul seeds are planted as shown in the figure below.
Our goal is to automate the sowing of saxaul seeds. We need the hardware and software required to draw road maps like the Acorn robot with GPS.
Hey this looks great! We are still working on finalizing a release version of our system, which will include documentation for our GPS system and other parts. We have very limited resources right now so it is difficult for us to provide much support, but we will be expanding our documentation as we get closer to a release of our kits. The good news, is, you can run our software on any normal computer using our simulation mode. Take a look here and hopefully this will get you started:
