2025 Judges Choice Impact Award Winner

$2.5K Prize Sponsored by Google.org

The PURT UAS Team developed an autonomous UAS (unmanned aircraft system) that can detect and map the location of female corn crops that still have tassels after machine detasseling, giving farmers a real-time view of where manual laborers need to focus. This reduces the time and money spent on manual labor and ensures that the quality and yield of seeds are not affected by inefficient detasseling.

The current corn detasseling process is inefficient because machine detasseling only removes 60-85% of tassels, which forces seed farmers to hire manual laborers to remove the remaining tassels. This process can take weeks across many acres of fields, and the quality and yield of seeds will be affected if any more than 1% of the female tassels remain.