Nevada Professor Wins $600K NSF Grant for Farm Robotics

Maini's five-year project, titled 'From Fields to Decisions: Planning and Sensing Cooperative Teams of Air and Ground Robots in Precision Agriculture,' pairs aerial drones with unmanned ground rovers to monitor crop health. The drones capture top-down views of plants while the rovers record side angles, and combining these perspectives builds comprehensive models that help growers reduce excess fertilizer and pesticide use.

The system also addresses common field robotics challenges, including limited battery life and unreliable wireless communications. Drones can land on the rovers to recharge during surveys, extending their operational time. Maini said the algorithms developed for this project could apply to other areas such as national defense, infrastructure inspection, and space exploration.

Maini completed his Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in 2012, followed by a Master of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi in 2014. He earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT-Delhi in 2020, then worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Minnesota Robotics Institute at the University of Minnesota from 2019 to 2023.

He joined the University of Nevada, Reno in 2023 as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, where he directs the Systems and Algorithms for Robot Autonomy Lab. In a separate initiative, he collaborates with university colleagues to develop autonomous robots for preparing construction sites on the moon and Mars.

Maini also engages students and local youth in robotics through university teams in national design competitions and outreach via 4-H programs, summer camps, and classroom visits across Nevada, reflecting the university's land-grant mission.