By Alicia Barrón
Raghu Nandivada was visiting family in rural south India in 2018 when, after a long day of work, his mother challenged him to invent a robot that removed weeds.
Nandivada comes from a family of farmers who harvest Indian staples like pulses, rice, red chilis and other vegetables. He reminded his mother he was not a robotics engineer — yet.
“Well, can you try?” she asked.
Nearly 10 years later, Nandivada is well on his way to answering his mother's challenge. His company, Padma AgRobotics, has developed several smart farming products for agriculture and is working to revolutionize the industry with robotic tools and artificial intelligence.
Sowing the seeds of success
After completing his undergraduate degree in computer engineering in India, Nandivada came to Arizona State University in 2001 to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. After graduating in 2003, he went to work in the semiconductor industry, returning to ASU in 2008 to earn his MBA from the W. P. Carey School of Business while still working.
“I've been associated with ASU forever,” Nandivada said. “Through this whole journey, ASU has been a big part of it.”
By 2020, Nandivada said he noticed more Waymo driverless cars on the street and figured someone must have already built a weed-removing robot. But he was wrong.
Seeing rising agricultural labor costs and the resulting strain on farmers, Nandivada began exploring the need for products like the weed-pulling machine his mom suggested.
“Farmers are being squeezed and automation is one way to help them be sustainable,” he said.
With little existing AI innovation in agriculture at the time, Nandivada spent a year doing customer discovery — “old school salesman stuff,” as he put it — knocking on doors to learn what problems farmers faced and how best to solve them.
At that time, he was still a principal engineer working in the semiconductor industry, so he would do his research in the evenings and over the weekend. Once he understood the problem, he came back to ASU.
“Everything comes back to ASU,” he said.
Weed-pulling robots
Nandivada met his Padma AgRobotics co-founder, Cole Brauer, in 2020. They learned about Venture Devils that same year.
Venture Devils is a program at J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute that provides resources and support to entrepreneurs working on for-profit or nonprofit enterprises. At the time, Venture Devils was actively seeking innovative projects to support and welcomed applications from both ASU students and the wider community.
So Nandivada and Brauer wrote a business plan for their weed-pulling robot concept and applied.
When COVID-19 hit, the Venture Devils competition results were announced online. Nandivada’s team won first place, earning $15,000 instead of the original $10,000 after judges recognized the project’s urgent value to farmers.
“Now it's not a side gig anymore,” he said. “This is serious business. It means there’s more responsibility to make it happen.”
Source : asu.edu