SDSU engineering students win NASA contest that helps farmers with precision agriculture

A team of South Dakota State University engineering students won a NASA contest May 21 for their work designing modules to install on drones to help agronomists and farmers understand their farmland throughout the year.

One of the modules samples soil before and after the growing season by flying autonomously and landing at many locations across a field, probing the soil to understand nutrient profiles. The other module samples tissue throughout the growing season by cutting the top leaf from a corn plant and collecting samples for further analysis in a lab.

“It’s a great day to be a Jackrabbit,” faculty advisor Todd Letcher said after learning the team won the NASA Gateways to Blue Skies contest at Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, Calif.

The contest’s theme this year was “AgAir: Aviation Solutions for Agriculture,” and entrants were tasked with researching new or improved aviation solutions to support agriculture.

SDSU mechanical engineering students Nick Wolles, Keegan Visher, Nathan Kuehl and Laura Peterson designed and tested the prototypes over the school year. Letcher said the team was probably the only one that brought a functional prototype to the competition with them.

Letcher said the team’s two drone attachments will help farmers and agronomists in a more precise way so they can adjust to their crop’s changing needs throughout the growing season.

The team began the project by contacting about 25 farmers, crop consultants and agronomists in eastern South Dakota and southwestern Minnesota, to see how an aerial vehicle could benefit them or enhance production.

“Figuring out what problem affected the most farmers took a lot of time,” Visher said.

The team participated in I-Corps, a business development training program through the National Science Foundation and Great Plains Hub, which encouraged them to conduct customer discovery sessions and gave them the answer for a drone with sensors.

NASA judges “loved that they did I-Corps” and “made sure to call it out at the awards ceremony as one of the reasons they chose us as winners,” Letcher said.

Letcher said the team’s design will help people better understand their land and crops to precisely apply fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and uses autonomous data collection to better apply those chemicals and save time on precision agriculture decisions.

They expect the soil sampling module could be ready for beta testing in the field by 2026, and ready for commercial sales in 2027. The leaf tissue sampler will be tested in 2025 and 2026 while AI systems are being trained. It could be ready for autonomous testing in 2027, beta testing in 2028, and commercial use in 2029.

Visher said he sees the technology as an “easily integratable system” and said it “wouldn’t be too much of a stretch” to see it get into many farmers’ and agronomists’ hands and into their fields to help them perform precision agriculture practices.

Team members said future SDSU students will pick up on the beta testing and commercialization of the project as part of their senior design capstone project, similar to other SDSU student projects, like a remote control snowblower. Kuehl said he hopes future SDSU students will continue to advance the award-winning technology.

SDSU’s team was one of 75 to enter the contest, and one of eight finalists chosen. Each team received $8,000 to cover travel costs to the finals.

Kuehl said winning the competition was “super rewarding” and that he was “super proud of this team for the hard work we put in.”

The winning team members were also offered internships at NASA. Each senior already has summer jobs lined up, but said they may reconsider the internship opportunity in a couple of months.

SDSU teams have also seen success in other NASA contests, including as one of six finalists in Break the Ice lunar excavation challenge in 2024, and the overall third place winner in 2024 in the RASC-AL (Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage) contest.

Letcher said SDSU has made an “arc of progress” from its first drone funding from NASA in 2020, to startup company AeroFly, which secured Phase 1 funding from NASA in 2024 and Phase 2 funding last week to last the next two years.