Convening leading research expertise from India, the United States, Japan and Australia, the QUAD initiative is propelling AI-led agricultural innovation onto the global stage, including the development of Smart Scout, an advanced AI-powered field intelligence system for pest damage and yield estimation model.
New Delhi, 29th October, 2026: Absolute, an AI-native biosolutions company, and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur) have been selected to develop Smart Scout, one of six projects in the inaugural cohort of the Quad’s Advancing Innovations for Empowering NextGen Agriculture (AI-ENGAGE) initiative. IIT Kharagpur leads the Indian research team, with Absolute as its industry partner. Conceived as an advanced AI-enabled computer-vision system for soybean monitoring, Smart Scout is designed to strengthen field intelligence by enabling earlier identification of lodging risk and more precise assessment of crop damage.
The Quad is a diplomatic partnership among Australia, India, Japan and the United States, committed to supporting a free and open, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient. Within this framework, AI-ENGAGE convenes researchers from across the four Quad nations to harness artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies in addressing shared and complex agricultural challenges.
The initiative is stewarded by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), linking the national research ecosystems of all four Quad countries. Each AI-ENGAGE project draws researchers from at least three member nations, while Smart Scout involves all four. The cohort as a whole is supported by a combined Quad investment exceeding US$6 million, with each agency funding its own country’s researchers. ICAR supports the Indian component of Smart Scout.
At the heart of the collaboration is a broader ambition to apply AI to some of the most consequential challenges shaping soybean productivity and resilience. The significance of the mission is amplified by soybean’s global importance: worldwide production exceeds 420 million tonnes, with the crop playing a major role across food, feed and oilseed systems. The United States is the world’s second-largest soybean producer, India is among the leading producing nations, while Japan meets a substantial share of its soybean demand through imports. In India alone, approximately 12.95 million hectares were under soybean cultivation in 2024-25, with Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra together accounting for around 84.5% of the country’s soybean area. This combination of global relevance and national scale makes soybean a particularly important crop for advanced, collaborative agricultural research.
Lodging is when crop plants bend or fall over before harvest. In soybean, it usually strikes late in the season, when pods are filling and plants are at their heaviest. Heavy rain softens the soil around the roots, strong wind pushes the plants over, and crops sown too densely grow tall, thin stems that give way easily. Insects that bore into the stem weaken plants further from the inside.
For a farmer, a lodged field means lost yield and poorer grain. Plants lying on wet soil are more prone to disease and pod rot, which lowers seed quality and the price it fetches. Flattened crops are also slow and wasteful to harvest, whether manually or by combine. Today, most farmers judge the extent of the damage by walking their fields plant by plant, often after the window for action has closed.
Smart Scout uses cameras and AI to give farmers a clearer view of their crop through the season. The system can be carried by hand or mounted on sprayers and other farm machinery, so scouting fits into work farmers already do. It is being built to support three decisions every soybean farmer faces: where to look closer, how much has been lost, and when to harvest.
For crop monitoring, regular field images capture plant height, stand density, early signs of leaning and pest pressure, so emerging problems show up field by field while there is still time to respond. For damage assessment, the system calculates a lodging score and the percentage of the field affected, and maps where the damage sits, giving farmers and agronomists a consistent, documented record of what was lost. For harvest planning, Smart Scout estimates yield during the season by counting pods and measuring pod length, helping farmers decide which fields to harvest first and plan labour, machinery and sales.
Dr. Ajay Sharda of Kansas State University, USA, leads Smart Scout internationally as the project’s Lead Principal Investigator (PI). In India, Prof. Peeyush Soni of IIT Kharagpur’s Department of Agricultural and Food Engineering serves as Principal Investigator, while Dr. Shivam Sharma from Absolute serves as Co-Principal Investigator. The wider consortium also includes scientists from Kobe University in Japan and the University of Southern Queensland in Australia.
The two institutions work from a single plan, each leading defined parts of the system and supporting the other across the rest.
IIT Kharagpur leads the data and modelling foundations. Its team standardises how field images are captured, annotated and augmented, develops and refines the yield-estimation models, and builds detection models that measure pest infestation in commercial fields and soybean nurseries. It also leads app development.
Absolute leads the components that turn those models into decisions in the field. It is developing the compact, AI-enabled computer-vision system for real-time crop monitoring, the lodging score and percentage that inform crop planning, and in-season yield estimates drawn from pod length and count. Absolute also leads the Smart Scout application and a data-visualisation dashboard for validating the models, and it will evaluate how usable and accurate the system is in the field.
Beyond these components, Absolute brings AI experience from across its science. Its Nature Intelligence Platform (NIP™) and Nature+™ already apply machine learning to discover and design biological solutions. INERA, Absolute’s agri-biotech arm, brings the field side, with a validation network spanning more than 10 agro-climatic zones and more than 50,000 field trials and farmer demonstrations to date.
Building on work already under way across the consortium, Smart Scout’s India chapter began in 2026. Smart Scout is a three-year project. Pilot trials in India will cover more than 30 acres of soybean across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, including approximately five acres at INERA’s trial station in Pune. Once validated, the work moves to farmer training, stakeholder workshops and knowledge-sharing with the Quad partners. Soybean is the starting point, and the approach is being designed so it can be replicated for other crops.
“Smart Scout will help farmers see lodging risk, crop damage and yield potential early enough to act,” said Prof. Peeyush Soni, Principal Investigator (India), IIT Kharagpur. “By bringing together IIT Kharagpur’s Agricultural & Food Engineering Department, Absolute and our Quad partners in the US, Japan and Australia, we aim to deliver field-ready AI that works under Indian conditions and can scale to millions of soybean hectares.”
“This is a significant moment for Absolute and for the evolution of agricultural innovation in India,” said Dr. Shivam Sharma, Co-Principal Investigator, Absolute. “In India’s soybean belt, one late-monsoon storm during pod filling can flatten a crop and cost up to a third of its yield. Smart Scout is built to read that risk while it is still forming. With soybean a major focus of the government’s National Mission on Edible Oils – Oilseeds, we see our work as closely aligned with that mission, helping farmers protect more of the crop they have already grown. Through this Quad collaboration, our field validation on smallholder farms will carry that intelligence from scientific research to better decisions on the farm.”
For Absolute, the collaboration is part of a wider effort to make AI integral to agricultural science. Through AI-ENGAGE, the company is extending the approach it uses to discover and design biology into the field, where timely, precise information can guide which interventions are chosen, tested and used.
About Absolute:
Absolute is a superintelligence bioscience company building biosolutions across Agriculture, Human Nutrition and Longevity. Absolute’s innovations are powered by its proprietary Nature Intelligence Platform (NIP™) — which houses over 35,000+ unique microbial strains, biomolecules, and enzymes sourced from extreme habitats around the world — along with its Nature Plus™ toolbox which uses AI to interrogate biological datasets, predict function and interactions, identify promising molecules and proteins, and design candidates for specific applications. Together, these platforms form a common discovery and validation engine across the domains in which Absolute operates. Absolute’s agricultural biosolutions business operates under the INERA brand. The company’s work has been recognised by organisations including Mars, Unreasonable Group and Deloitte Technology Fast 50, and Norrsken Impact/100 – 2023 with spotlight on Nasdaq Times Square. Learn more at www.absolute.bio