Smarter Way to Water: Grade 12 innovator builds drone to keep Dubai’s green spaces alive

Months of planting, watering and patient care can disappear during one Dubai summer. Antony Sheshenya saw it happen in the eco-garden at Dubai American Academy, where plants nurtured by students dried out while the school was closed. The loss gave the 17-year-old Grade 12 student an engineering problem worth solving.

“Plants that we had spent months planting and taking care of were dying over the summer, essentially reducing all of that effort to zero,” he says. Similar neglect, he noticed, affected eco-gardens and landscaped areas in schools and business complexes whenever students and employees left for extended holidays.

His solution was Mriya 2.0, a project that pairs a Mavic 2 drone with soil-moisture sensors to identify plants needing water. The drone then irrigates those areas instead of watering an entire garden uniformly. Antony designed it as an affordable alternative to existing systems, with the potential to conserve water and reduce the hours landscaping workers spend outdoors during Dubai’s hottest months.

“We all know what it feels like to walk outside in Dubai when temperatures can approach 50 degrees, let alone work in that heat for hours,” he says. The project addresses three connected concerns: preserving the city’s green spaces, protecting workers from extreme temperatures and using water more precisely.

Antony remains attentive to the people behind Dubai’s landscaped surroundings. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and automation, he feels, can obscure the contribution of workers who maintain the everyday spaces that residents often take for granted. His system is intended to support those workers by making their jobs safer and introducing opportunities to learn new technical skills.

“I didn’t want to create something that would replace these workers,” he says. “I wanted something that could complement their work, giving them new skills, teaching them how to use the technology and ultimately making their jobs safer and easier.”

Turning the idea into a functioning prototype required repeated redesigns. Affordable drones were usually too small to carry the irrigation equipment, while models with sufficient lifting power were prohibitively expensive. Antony selected a Mavic 2 and engineered every component around its payload limit, continually reducing weight and testing different configurations.

Water presented another complication. Movement during flight could cause it to splash onto the drone’s electronics. Antony developed a sealed tank and secured the tubing so that the liquid remained contained throughout the journey.

The long cycle of sketches, trials and failures finally produced a working flight. “Seeing something that had existed only as an idea in my head finally working in front of me was an incredible feeling,” he says. “It almost felt like my own kid, something I had built from the ground up, struggled with, watched fail, fixed over and over again, and finally watched succeed.”

There were moments during the development process when Antony felt lost or unsure of his next step. Working through each technical problem taught him to examine why something had failed, understand the mechanics involved and find his own way forward. The experience strengthened an ambition he has carried since childhood.

“I’ve always wanted to become an aerospace engineer; it’s been my passion since I was a kid,” he says.

The project also introduced Antony to the full discipline of engineering: sketching, designing, building, testing and improving an idea until it performs as intended. Watching a concept become a functioning system has made him more determined to apply engineering to larger problems in the future.

His advice to other students comes from the hours when his own prototype refused to cooperate. “If you have an idea and you truly believe in it, stick with it until the end,” he says. “There will be moments when it doesn’t work and you question whether it’s worth continuing. If you keep going, you’ll eventually look back and be proud that you didn’t give up.”