SDSU Claims NASA Blue Skies Victory

Four mechanical engineering students from South Dakota State University found a way to make drones more useful for farmers and won a prestigious NASA contest in the process.   

The first-place SDSU team was one of eight finalists in NASA’s Gateways to Blue Skies contest last spring, with a theme of AgAir: Aviation Solutions for Agriculture. Teams were instructed to conceptualize novel aviation systems that can be applied to agriculture by 2035 or sooner with the goal of improving production, efficiency, environmental impact and extreme weather/climate resilience.   

Now SDSU alums, having graduated in May, the students did just that with their STaPLE drone. That stands for Soil Testing and Plant Leaf Extraction. Using GPS technology and artificial-intelligence image analysis software, the drone would fly to determined areas within a field to either take a soil sample or clip off plant leaves for future analysis. The soil sampling module would be used in spring or fall when plants weren’t growing. The extraction module would be used during the growing seasons.   

Their presentation impressed NASA and aviation industry judges at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, May 20-21. This is the fourth year for the contest, but it is the first year that SDSU has entered.   

The SDSU team was comprised of Nathan Kuehl '25 of Avoca, Minnesota; Laura Peterson '25 of Fredericksburg, Virginia; Keegan Visher '25 of Excelsior, Minnesota, and Nick Wolles '25 of Dell Rapids.   

To develop a project idea, the team expanded it's outreach, and that impressed the judges.   

“Our team leveraged their experience in another one of our programs (the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps in the Great Plains Hub) to learn about their customer base and to design a product that the customers want, not what we think they want,” Todd Letcher '05, the project adviser and an associate professor in mechanical engineering, said. “The judges loved that they did I-Corps and talked with 25 potential customers and made sure to call it out at the awards ceremony as one of the reasons they chose us as winners.”   

He said judges also were impressed that SDSU’s project “was very practical and something that could be implemented very soon with existing technology and agronomy knowledge.” Blue Skies finalists were not required to build a prototype and, in fact, SDSU was the only team to do so.  

The team members’ hard work was aided by their environment. SDSU was the first university in the nation to have a precision agriculture major and provided ample resources for their work. Also, SDSU’s Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering has been working with drones for some time. In fact, the Brookings-based startup company AeroFly is the product of a previous NASA contest for college students. The modules that the students prototyped are slated to fly on an AeroFly drone.  

Written by University Marketing & Communications