An IIT Kharagpur team led by Professor Dilip Kumar Pratihar developed a semi-automatic tracked mobile manipulator for agricultural use. India’s Press Information Bureau reported the work in May 2025, identifying doctoral and project researchers among the contributors and noting an Indian patent.
The platform mounts a serial robotic arm on a tracked vehicle and uses camera-based leaf analysis to support disease detection and subsequent spraying. Funding came from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and TECHNIDO manufactured the robot. The release also linked a field-testing video. It describes a research system and its intended benefits, but does not provide enough comparative measurements to conclude that it outperforms drones, manual scouting or other sprayers in all crops.
