ARPA-E Award for Printed Agricultural Sensors

We are very excited to announce that we have been selected for roughly $1.7M of project funding from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) as part of the Sensors for Bioenergy and Agriculture Cohort under the new OPEN+ program. The project, titled Precision Agriculture using Networks of Degradable Analytical Sensors (PANDAS), will focus on developing a dense network of low-cost, 3D-printed, chip-less, zero-power biodegradable sensors to continuously determine soil properties such as moisture and nutrient concentration. By improving agricultural input use efficiency this project could enable significant reductions in energy use and water needs, while improving soil carbon and farm economics.

More information about the project can be found in an article from the Mechanical Engineering Department, and on ARPA-E's website.