NXP HoverGames3: Land, Sky, Food Supply

The challenge

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NXP HoverGames Challenge 3: Land, Sky, Food Supply

The NXP HoverGames is back with another challenge – and this time, it’s all about sustainable food production. We’ve had some amazing ideas in our first two years, solving issues in firefighting and pandemics with drones, so what can you come up with now?

Humanity’s growth and success over the last few thousand years is arguably due to our ability to feed ourselves. Whether it’s farming, hunting, fishing, or another source of food, we have been able to manage food ecosystems around the world.

But our world’s population is still growing fast, and hundreds of millions of people already go hungry, while habitats are destroyed for agriculture – can we claim success when children are still not getting enough to eat? While we need more food, we must also ensure that food and farming is not damaging our environment, with greenhouse gas reduction a priority.

Whether it’s shifting cultivation in the tropics, fish farming, commercial grain farming in Europe, or tea plantations in Asia and Latin America –we need to make all the different types of farming, food production and its supply chain as efficient as possible, without damaging habitats and the diversity of nature. We also need to meet new demands for organic, cruelty-free food, while taking into account the millions of people who rely on the food industry for their incomes. Technology will be essential in meeting all these challenges.

Because of this, we’re focusing on sustainable food ecosystems for the third NXP HoverGames. We need you and your ideas – show us how drones and rovers can make our food ecosystem more sustainable!

Of course, it’s not just about farming: we still get much of our food from fishing, which represents 17% of the current global production of edible meat, as well as from gathering or hunting wild plants and animals. Invertebrates are also on the menu: we get honey from bees, and eating insects is popular in many countries.

In today’s ecosystems, money has become the most important criterion. Corn may grow in my neighborhood but sold in China, while shrimp are fished in Europe’s North Sea, but peeled in North Africa. Farming has become more efficient, but with a focus on monoculture that can harm wildlife. The balance has shifted too far, and we have an unsustainable system – how can technology help us fix it?

WHAT WILL YOU ENABLE YOUR NXP HOVERGAMES DRONE TO DO?

A famous pioneer, Neil Armstrong, once said: "Science is about what is, and engineering is about what can be." Show us what the food production of the future can be, and how autonomous drones and rovers can get us there.

Your challenge is to come up with innovative ways to use drones and rovers in sustainable food production. Feel free to interpret this quite broadly – you could go for anything that supports sustainable food production, in conventional agriculture, aquaculture or new areas such as vertical farming. Your application could be in a desert, over the oceans, or in the tropical rain forest. Or you could focus on our changing climate and how it might affect food production, or look at how we can better protect animals and insects, and maintain biodiversity.

Your NXP HoverGames vehicle should be able to carry out its mission as autonomously as possible, with the help of your code. Your drone or rover could, for example, fly or drive across fields of crops looking for damage or unusual growth that might indicate pests or disease, and only report back to its human operator when it sees something wrong.

NEW! Bosch Sensortec Sustainability Award

NXP is proud to announce that we have teamed up with Bosch Sensortec, adding their BME688 AI-enabled environmental gas sensor to the developer kits. These compact and low-power sensors can detect a broad range of gases in the part per billion (ppb) range. The gas scanner can be customized for sensitivity, selectivity, data rate and power consumption and can be trained to a specific application using the Bosch BME AI-Studio tool. For example, in a drone or rover application, the presence of volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) can be used as an indicator for bacteria growth in food crops. Bosch Sensortec also supports the challenge by offering a special sustainability award to honor the most effective sensor-based solution that pursues sustainability goals.

In line with the Bosch business principle "Invented for life," Bosch Sensortec aims to improve people's quality of life and safeguard the livelihoods of present and future generations. Sustainability, climate protection, and nature conservation play a central role in this.

We see innovation as a driving factor in the fight against climate change and for a more sustainable future. That is why we are offering a special sustainability award at this year's NXP HoverGames.

TECH YOU'LL USE

The NXP mobile robotics kits are modular and developer-friendly, using reliable automotive and industrial-grade components from NXP, and supported by PX4 - the largest commercially deployed open-source drone software stack with business-friendly licensing. You can experiment with additional hardware components from NXP and other providers – you are only bound by your own creativity.

Choose between the HoverGames drone development kit and the all-new HoverGames rover.

The drone kit contains:

• Strong, rigid lightweight carbon fiber quadcopter frame with platform, mounting rails, landing gear, motor controllers, motors and props
• Telemetry radio and remote control (RC) radio
• Vehicle Management Unit (RDDRONE-FMUK66 FMU) that’s supported by the open-source PX4 flight stack on top of NuttX RTOS.

The rover kit contains:

• High-tech platform for mobile robotics built on top of a WLToys 12409 chassis
• All necessary components such as a motor, ESC, servo and GPS
• Vehicle Management Unit (RDDRONE-FMUK66 FMU) that’s supported by the open-source PX4 flight stack on top of NuttX RTOS.

PLUS: NXP NAVQ+ edge compute board with vision and neural-net acceleration

All contestants applying successfully for hardware will get the NXP NavQPlus Mission Computer

• i.MX 8M Plus application processor with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) operating at up to 2.3 TOPS. ​
• Dual MIPI-CSI cameras with dual ISPs. Hardware accelerated multimedia capabilities including 1080p60 h.264/h.265 video encode and decode ​
• 1000Base-TX Gb Ethernet with IX industrial connectors
• Dual CAN-FD​
• Dual USB-C 3.1​
• WiFi 5 / BTLE 5.0​
• Linux Ubuntu/Yocto, ROS/ROS2, FastRTPS, OpenCV​
• SE050 Edgelock secure element with NFC interface​

PLUS: Bosch Sensortec BME688 AI-enabled environmental gas sensor

All contestants applying successfully for hardware will get the sensor + connecting cables

The BME688 is the first gas sensor with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and integrated high-linearity and high-accuracy pressure, humidity and temperature sensors. It is housed in a robust yet compact 3.0 x 3.0 x 0.9 mm³ package and especially developed for mobile & connected applications where size and low power consumption are critical requirements. The gas sensor can detect Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs) and other gases such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the part per billion (ppb) range.

Prizes

NXP Awards

1st Place

$5000 e-giftcard

2nd Place

$3000 e-giftcard

3rd Place

$1500 e-giftcard

Runner Ups

3 winners

$500 voucher for NXP webshop

Bosch Sensortec Sustainability Award

The Bosch Sensortec Sustainability Award honors the most convincing sensor-based solution that pursues sustainability goals. The winner of the award will be rewarded with a 500 € voucher for the Arduino Official Store.

1 winner

500 € voucher for the Arduino Official Store

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$500 value

Judges

Resources

About us

NXP Mobile Robotics Ecosystem provides a broad portfolio of solutions for mobile robotics applications such as drones and rovers, including application-specific reference hardware and software solutions for vehicle management units, i.MX applications processor-based mission computers, automotive Ethernet and CAN-FD networking, battery management, IoT remote sensing and TOF/Vision sensing. Many of these solutions are complemented by NFC and secure element(s) for security and provisioning.

HoverGames series of hands-on virtual embedded hardware and coding challenges is the flagship annual developer event hosted with Hackster, uniting developers around the world to address some of the biggest challenges facing society using the NXP HoverGames hardware platforms.