Related papers: Bimanual crop manipulation for human-inspired robo…
Mechanizing the manual harvesting of fresh market fruits constitutes one of the biggest challenges to the sustainability of the fruit industry. During manual harvesting of some fresh-market crops like strawberries and table grapes, pickers…
Human hands are able to grasp a wide range of object sizes, shapes, and weights, achieved via reshaping and altering their apparent grasping stiffness between compliant power and rigid precision. Achieving similar versatility in robotic…
In this paper, we present the lessons learnt during the development of a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper (capsicum) in protected cropping environments. Robotic harvesting offers an attractive…
Dormant season grapevine pruning requires skilled seasonal workers during the winter season which are becoming less available. As workers hasten to prune more vines in less time amid to the short-term seasonal hiring culture and low wages,…
There is growing interest in automating agricultural tasks that require intricate and precise interaction with specialty crops, such as trees and vines. However, developing robotic solutions for crop manipulation remains a difficult…
Automating tasks in outdoor agricultural fields poses significant challenges due to environmental variability, unstructured terrain, and diverse crop characteristics. We present a robotic system for autonomous pepper harvesting designed to…
Blackberry harvesting is a labor-intensive and costly process, consuming up to 50\% of the total annual crop hours. This paper presents a solution for robotic harvesting through the design, manufacturing, integration, and control of a…
The intricate kinematics of the human hand enable simultaneous grasping and manipulation of multiple objects, essential for tasks such as object transfer and in-hand manipulation. Despite its significance, the domain of robotic multi-object…
There is a growing need for robotic apple harvesting due to decreasing availability and rising cost in labor. Towards the goal of developing a viable robotic system for apple harvesting, this paper presents synergistic mechatronic design…
Many everyday objects are difficult to directly grasp (e.g., a flat iPad) or manipulate functionally (e.g., opening the cap of a pen lying on a desk). Such tasks require sequential, asymmetric coordination between two arms, where one arm…
We describe the construction and evaluation of two robotic grippers for berry picking. Using a pneumatic cylinder drive, one was constructed from hard materials and the other from soft materials. A novel evaluation paradigm using a handle…
High efficiency in precision farming depends on accurate tools to perform weed detection and mapping of crops. This allows for precise removal of harmful weeds with a lower amount of pesticides, as well as increase of the harvest's yield by…
Picking diverse objects in the real world is a fundamental robotics skill. However, many objects in such settings are bulky, heavy, or irregularly shaped, making them ungraspable by conventional end effectors like suction grippers and…
Grasping an unknown object is difficult for robot hands. When the characteristics of the object are unknown, knowing how to plan the speed at and width to which the fingers are narrowed is difficult. In this paper, we propose a method to…
Containerized vertical farming is a type of vertical farming practice using hydroponics in which plants are grown in vertical layers within a mobile shipping container. Space limitations within shipping containers make the automation of…
Robotic manipulation with two-finger grippers is challenged by objects lacking distinct graspable features. Traditional pre-grasping methods, which typically involve repositioning objects or utilizing external aids like table edges, are…
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation and tree grabbing in a confined, GPS denied forest…
This study presents a methodology to safely manipulate branches to aid various agricultural tasks. Humans in a real agricultural environment often manipulate branches to perform agricultural tasks effectively, but current agricultural…
This paper addresses the challenge of occluded robot grasping, i.e. grasping in situations where the desired grasp poses are kinematically infeasible due to environmental constraints such as surface collisions. Traditional robot…
Autonomous dual-arm manipulation is an essential skill to deploy robots in unstructured scenarios. However, this is a challenging undertaking, particularly in terms of perception and planning. Unstructured scenarios are full of objects with…