Features

Girish Chowdhary, co-founder of EnterpriseWorks startup EarthSense, was featured in a BBC article for his expertise in the field of agricultural robotics. Chowdhary explains that largely autonomous farms are just over the horizon, as many emerging technologies, such as robots that can monitor the health of crops, are being put to use in research fields. “A farm is going to need different kinds of robots,” says Chowdhary. “Some of them are going to be very small…others are going to be big, perhaps even as big as the combine harvester. There will be an autonomous system that is co-ordinating this team of robots, telling them what they need to do in order to get different tasks done.” In addition to robots, Chowardly predicts that drones will be increasingly utilized in the agricultural domain. “Drones are really good at covering a lot of space… they can go somewhere and spray something, or take a picture, really quickly,” says Chowdhary. EarthSense is creating dramatic new possibilities for crop breeders, plant protection products developers, crop scientists, and field agronomists. TerraSentia, their first robot, improves the quantity, accuracy, cost, and speed of in-field plant trait data collection, specifically for under canopy plants. EarthSense machine vision and machine learning-based analytics seamlessly convert field data to specific, actionable information about plant-traits.

Kaiyu Guan, founder of EnterpriseWorks startup Aspiring Universe, was a principal investigator to the University of Illinois report, Redefining drought in the US corn belt. This report was featured in a Forbes article.  Stating the climate is now trending warmer and drier, global food security is now increasingly dependent on crops’ ability to withstand droughts, and producers aren’t focused on the right metrics when measuring crop-relevant droughts.  Kaiyu Guan said, “Plants have to balance water supply and demand. Both are extremely critical, but people overlook the demand of the equation, especially in the U.S. Corn Belt. If you only consider rainfall and soil moisture, that’s mostly describing the supply side. Of course, if you have low soil moisture, plants will be stressed by how much water they get. However, the demand side from the atmosphere can also severely stress plants. We need to pay more attention to that drought signal.” Aspiring Universe (ASP) is a farming financial risk modeling company. ASP helps financial institutes, public agencies, and individual producers to quantify, manage, and reduce financial risks in the farming-related business.  They aim to monitor and model every crop field’s financial risks in the United States and worldwide. ASP has developed revolutionary approaches to rate historical and real-time financial risks for each crop field and each farmer, by integrating advancing technology in three domains: satellite/corp modeling, artificial intelligence, and agricultural finance modeling.

Eden Park Illumination, a faculty-founded startup that launched at the  EnterpriseWorks incubator at Research Park, drew the attention of the Wall Street Journal for pivoting its UV light technology to address COVID-19. In the process, it has rejuvenated the company and has experienced unprecedented growth. Wall Street Journal reporter Ruth Simon profiled the company in her recent story, “Covid-19 Shuttered More Than 1 Million Small Businesses. Here Is How Five Survived.” Wrote Simon, in the Journal’s August 1 editions: “Eden Park Illumination Inc. had one product to sell before Covid-19: an ultraviolet light that distinguished real diamonds from fakes. The spread of a deadly virus across the globe shifted the focus of the tiny Champaign, Ill., startup to another ultraviolet light application that it had not planned to introduce for at least two years. This one would disinfect crowded spaces. Within weeks, the 10-person company began shipping prototypes. Eden Park has since delivered more than 1,000 of the lights and added a dozen workers, including a head of manufacturing.” Eden Park Illumination was founded by Gary Eden and Sun-Jin Park, then University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign electrical engineering faculty members (Eden is now an emeritus faculty member). It graduated from EnterpriseWorks in 2009. Eden and Park remain part of the company; it recently hired a new CEO, John Yerger. Now based on the west side of Champaign, the company manufactures flat panel, thin 222 nm UV lamps that “may provide immediate relief in mitigating COVID-19 outbreaks in populated indoor spaces, including factories, submarines, aircraft carriers, planes, waiting rooms, restaurants and more.” The company has also been profiled on Fox Business News with other mentions on ABC News and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  For more about the company and its technology, visit the Eden Park website.