Yu She Principal Investigator of Team Awarded NIFA Grant.
The award will help Yu and his team research robotic strawberry harvesting with tactile-enhanced grasping and legged locomotion, which may help address labor shortages in agricultural settings.
Yu She, Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering.
Assistant Professor Yu She was inspired while out strawberry picking with his wife. He realized that his work in tactile sensors could be applied to picking delicate fruits such as strawberries and blueberries. While his work focuses on tactile sensors and manipulation, his lab's robotic arms are fixed. Therefore, in order to work in a field setting such as strawberry harvesting, he reached out to Associate Professor Yan Gu of Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering, who has expertise in robotic locomotion.
“Basically, I install the robotic manipulator from my group on the mobile platform in her group, then she works on locomotion, I work on manipulation.”
Collaborating with Gu helped to address the robotics and engineering side of this project, but the team sought out expertise in the field of agriculture and through networking She was connected with Dr. Wonsuk “Daniel” Lee, Professor, Machine Vision and Precision Agriculture with the University of Florida’s department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.
The team will work on the project over the next three years, beginning with combining the manipulator with the locomotion and testing in the field in California and Florida during the final phase. She also wanted to acknowledge the School of Industrial Engineering and the Institute of Control, Optimization, and Networks (ICON) - Focus Area of Strategic Technology (FAST), whose support was instrumental in this endeavor.
Related Links
Yu She Recipient of Showalter Trust Research Award
Source: Yu She
Writer: Dave Montgomery