Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The demand for affordable, nutritious, and delicious strawberries continues to grow while the availability of manual field laborers continues to decline. Current strawberry picking operations require the picker to spend time carrying each picked box of strawberries to the edge of the field to a collection station. Our proposed autonomous four-wheeled strawberry transport robot could carry the picked boxes of strawberries out of the field while the picker continues to pick. In this way, the picker can pick more and thus earn more, and the farmer can save money by picking the same number of strawberries with fewer laborers or the farmer can increase production with the same labor. We are designing the robots to be so light weight that they will not be a danger to the pickers.In order for the robots to save money by replacing human time, the robots must be inexpensive. We have designed a low cost platform using plastic components and we use low cost electric motors developed for high-volume consumer products. During this effort, we will utilize our software expertise as well as the robotics knowledge from our Caltech partners in order to design the guidance system for the autonomous robot so that it can follow the furrows in the strawberry field, avoid collisions, and transport the strawberries to the collection station without human intervention. The availability of powerful computers at affordable prices, allows for the first time the sophistication of autonomous operation at a cost such that increasing the production of a manual laborer is economical.We expect that trials with the robots developed under this project will demonstrate an increase in productivity of the human pickers of 50%. Strawberry farmers in our area understand the economics of automated transport very well and are eagerly anticipating using the robots developed under this effort.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
10%
Applied
10%
Developmental
80%
Goals / Objectives
The ultimate goal of this project is to enhance the productivity of strawberry pickers through automating the transport of their picked berries from the center of the field to the collection stations at the edge of the field. By eliminating the 1/3 of their time that they spend transporting the berries, the pickers can pick 50% more berries and thus make more money and the farmers can get more berries from the field even in the face of a decreasing labor force. Strawberries in California alone spend $600M/year on picking labor, thus presenting an opportunity to achieve $300M/year more in productivity from that labor by using autonomous transport robots in conjunction with human pickers.
Project Methods
Our work will build on a strawberry transport platform that we have been developing over the last two years using limited internal funds. This platform uses a frame and motor mounts constructed from a combination of low-cost PVC plastic pipes and special-purpose parts designed and 3D printed by us using ABS plastic. Each of the four wheels has its own drive motor and steer motor. The low level drive electronics, motor sensors, and servo controls are implemented by a combination of off-the-shelf and custom electronics, including an Arduino board.The vision system consists of a dual-core fanless PC receiving image data over USB from web cameras. While the steer and drive systems have been demonstrated, the Phase I effort will be focused on the image processing software. With guidance from our Caltech collaborators, we will use OpenCV and ROS open-source software systems as a base for our specialized software to implement the four basic Phase I algorithms: furrow tracking, collision avoidance, picker following, picker leading.Office software development will be augmented by laboratory and parking lot trial runs, with progression to real strawberry field operations within an hour's drive of our location as soon as possible. Terry Farms in Venture (NW of us) and OC Produce in Irvine (SE of us) are both extremely interested in the outcome of this project and have volunteered their fields and staff for trials.