The University of North Carolina at Wilmington announced on Mar. 1 the development of SanaSolo, an autonomous rover designed to analyze soil and support sustainable farming practices. The project began as a backyard gardening experiment and has evolved into a collaborative research effort involving students and faculty.
The initiative is significant because it aims to provide farmers and gardeners with tools that can help them make better decisions for long-term land viability. Laavanya Rachakonda, assistant professor of computer science and director of the Smart and Intelligent Physical Systems Laboratory at UNCW, leads the team behind SanaSolo. She said, “Our solution is something that will grow with the user. It will adapt to the lifestyle of the user and also to the plant and soil.” Rachakonda describes this system as part of a larger TerraSense ecosystem—a network of interconnected agricultural robots intended to promote accessible farming.
Samuel Stasiewicz, a senior at UNCW, contributed his interest in small-scale agriculture after experimenting with gardening during the pandemic. He submitted a proposal to Rachakonda which led to years-long collaboration expanding from measuring earthworm populations in soil to developing multiple robotic systems including SanaSolo for soil analysis, a ‘snake bot’ for aeration, TerraSana for evaluating plant nutrition, and another component focused on user health.
Stasiewicz tested early prototypes in campus gardens while serving as president of the UNCW Garden Club. Together with Rachakonda, he presented their work at national and international conferences hosted by IEEE. College of Science and Engineering Dean Ron Vetter involved David Knight—a former John Deere executive—who now serves as an advisor connecting industry engineers with the project.
Support from organizations such as UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s IDEA Test Lab helped identify business value for SanaSolo; it received third place recognition there along with funding from NCInnovation’s Pipeline Development Initiative.
Reflecting on his experience working on intelligent systems engineering projects like SanaSolo, Stasiewicz said: “We get to focus on AI and robotics, and that’s the biggest wave in technology that we’ve seen since the internet. Maybe even bigger than
the internet.”
