8 accepted papers
Automating chicken shoulder deboning requires precise 6-DoF cutting through a partially occluded, deformable, multi-material joint, since contact with the bones presents serious health and safety risks. Our work makes both systems-level and algorithmic contributions to train and deploy a reactive fo…
The small scale of urban farms and the commercial availability of low-cost robots (such as the FarmBot) that automate simple tending tasks enable an accessible platform for plant phenotyping. We have used a FarmBot with a custom camera end-effector to estimate strawberry plant flower pose (for robot
Effective pollination is a key challenge for indoor farming, since bees struggle to navigate without the sun. While a variety of robotic system solutions have been proposed, it remains difficult to autonomously check that a flower has been sufficiently pollinated to produce high-quality fruit, which
Global blackberry demand has been surging due to their antioxidant and nutritional value in a traditional diet. However, blackberries have extreme fragility (resulting in up to 85% of harvest batches sustaining damage) and near-ripe and ripe blackberries are difficult to distinguish in normal lighti…
Growing global demand for food, coupled with continuing labor shortages, motivate the need for automated agricultural harvesting. While some specialty crops (e.g., apples, peaches, blueberries) can be harvested via existing harvesting modalities, fruits such as blackberries and raspberries require d…
Control of wire-borne underactuated brachiating robots requires a robust feedback control design that can deal with dynamic uncertainties, actuator constraints and unmeasurable states. In this paper, we develop a robust feedback control for brachiating on flexible cables, building on previous work o…
This paper describes the dynamic modeling and locomotion control of a two-link underactuated brachiating robot traversing a flexible cable. A multi-body system comprised of a two-link robot, a flexible cable, and coupling soft junctions is modeled dynamically. This model is used to formulate an ener…
A novel brachiating robot design is presented for the purpose of traversing elevated wire networks. The robot is capable of moving along a single wire and between parallel wires, thereby enabling traversal of a two-dimensional space. Several novel features distinguish this design compared to previou…