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The Center for Digital Agriculture will be participating in the University of Illinois’ Engineering Open House on Friday, April 8th from 9:00am-4:00pm. Stop by the Bardeen Quad and check out exhibit #24 “A Robot Picking Berries in your Garden.” During this exhibit we will present a hybrid rigid-soft arm and manipulator for performing tasks requiring dexterity and reach in cluttered environments. Our system combines the benefit of the dexterity of a variable length soft manipulator and the rigid support capability of a hard arm. The hard arm positions the extendable soft manipulator close to the target, and the soft arm manipulator navigates the last few centimeters to reach and grab the target. A novel magnetic sensor and reinforcement learning based control is developed for end effector position control of the robot.
We will limit our demo to detection of berries on a plant (fake one) using an onboard Intel RealSense camera. The perception algorithm deploys Fast R-CNN to detect the ripe berries and the depth information to obtain the position information of the berries ready to be picked. The spatial information is then used to move the hybrid arm to the location of the berries. The robotic arm also has the capability to deploy its extrudable soft arm to go inside a plant and reach the berries that are difficult to reach with the rigid robot arm.