Flower Interaction Subsystem for a Precision Pollination Robot

Strader, Jared; Yang, Chizhao; Gu, Yu; Nguyen, Jennifer; Tatsch, Christopher; Du, Yi; Lassak, Kyle; Buzzo, Benjamin; Watson, Ryan M.; Cerbone, Henry; Ohi, Nicholas

doi:10.1109/iros40897.2019.8967752

Cited by 23 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The term Precision Agriculture is described as being "a management strategy that uses electronic information and other technologies to gather, process, and analyze spatial and temporal data for the purpose of guiding targeted actions that improve efficiency, productivity, and sustainability of agricultural operations" [1] . Robotic technology is a powerful tool to realize targeted actions in agriculture, which usually rely on machine vision or other sensing technologies to perform selective or targeted working of seed sowing [77] , Seedling sorting/replanting [78] , spraying [79,80] weeding [81] , pruning [82,83] , trimming [60,[84][85][86] , flower or fruit thinning [87,88] , fruit bagging [87,89,90] , de-leafing [91,92] , pollination [93][94][95][96][97] , bin-handling [98][99][100] , fruit transportation [101,102] , fruit grading [103,104] , etc. (Table 5).…”

Section: Other Selective Working Robots In Crop-farmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development status and trend of agricultural robot technology

Jin¹,

Liu²,

Xu³

et al. 2021

International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the face of the contradiction between the increasing demand for agricultural products and the sharp reduction of agricultural resources and labor force, agricultural robot technology is developing explosively on the basis of decades of technical and industrial exploration. In view of the complexity and particularity of the development of agricultural robot technology, it is of great value to summarize its development characteristics and make reasonable judgments on its development trend. In this paper, the type of agricultural robot systems was first discussed. From the classification of agricultural robot systems, the development of main types of monitoring robots, non-selective and selective working robots for crop farming, livestock and poultry farming and aquaculture were introduced in detail. Then the scientific research, core technology, and commercialization of different types of agricultural robots were summarized. It is believed that navigation in complex agricultural environments, damage-free robot-crop interaction, and agronomy-robot fusion have high scientific value and significance to promote the revolutionary advances in agricultural robot technology. The characteristics of inter-discipline between agricultural robot technology and new materials, artificial intelligence, bionics, agronomy are research focus. The fast damage-free operation, autonomous navigation for complex environments, target detection for complex backgrounds, and special design for agricultural robots are considered to be the key technology of agricultural robot development, and the development path is given. Finally, robot-crop interaction simulation, big data support, and artificial intelligence are regarded as paths to realize the breakthrough of key agricultural robot technologies. The summary and prospect of this paper are of positive significance to promote the overall development of agricultural robot technology.

show abstract

Section: Other Selective Working Robots In Crop-farmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development status and trend of agricultural robot technology

Jin¹,

Liu²,

Xu³

et al. 2021

International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Unhindered by the technical problems involved in scaling complex technologies down to the size of insects, larger devices are able to deploy state-ofthe-art spatial sensing and mapping technologies together with sophisticated heuristics programming in order to identify and map the positions of flowers and their reproductive organs before calculating the most efficient route of pollen collection and transfer. The BrambleBee, developed by researchers at West Virginia University, is a wheeled ground vehicle equipped with a robotic arm and multiple on-board cameras, which operates autonomously by running numerous sophisticated algorithms and does not require a human controller (Ohi et al, 2018;Strader et al, 2019).…”

Section: Enter Robobee: Technologies Of Artificial Pollinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Replacing cheap nature? Sustainability, capitalist future-making and political ecologies of robotic pollination

Nimmo

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article undertakes a critical examination of emergent technologies involving the use of robots to carry out crop pollination in the context of declining populations of bees and other insect pollinators. It grasps robotic pollination research and development as a future-making practice, which imagines and partially materialises one possible future by inscribing a specific ontology in the present which is geared to enact that future. Unpacking this, the article traces how artificial pollination reframes pollination ecology around a productivist ontology and inscribes a web of meanings around nature, technology and economy which point to a future where insect pollinators are largely absent or extinct. It argues that this effectively backgrounds alternative futures in which structural transformations of agriculture and the world food system are able to mitigate and avert pollinator decline and biodiversity loss, and also reveals the deep rationale of artificial pollination. While invoking notions of sustainability and food security, robotic pollination defines these in highly anthropocentric, economistic and self-referential terms, as a matter of enabling the reproduction of agro-industrial capital accumulation. Drawing upon the political ecology of Jason W Moore, the article situates robotic pollination as a future-making project in relation to capitalist strategies of accumulation through the appropriation of ‘Cheap Nature’, to show how the automation of pollination would enact a shift in the composition of agro-industrial capital, with systemic consequences inimical to both ecological sustainability and sustained accumulation. In this respect, robotic pollination is a case study in the propensity of capital to invest in the making of sustainable futures only insofar as sustainability equates to the reproduction of capital within the web of life.

show abstract

“…Nonetheless, there remain huge demands for the development of material-engineering-based intelligent robotic pollination for effectively and efficiently pollinating crops. In addition, developing and designing of intelligent functional robots is attractive as an emerging technology and promising for autonomous precision robotic pollination (Ohi et al, 2018;Strader et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soap Bubble Pollination

Yang

Miyako

2020

iScience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Natural and artificial flower pollination are critical processes in the life cycle of flowering plants. Declines in the number of global pollinator insects, the heavy labor of conducting artificial pollination manually, and the rising cost of pollen grains are considered to be significant worldwide problems. Here we show that chemically functionalized soap bubbles exhibit effective and convenient delivery of pollen grains to the targeted flowers thanks to their stickiness, softness, high flexibility, and enhancement of pollen activity. By exploring the physicochemical properties of functional soap bubbles, we could prepare mechanically stabilized soap bubbles capable of withstanding the windmills produced by robotic pollination. An unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a soap bubble maker was autonomously controlled to pollinate flowers. Such technology of automatic intelligent robotic pollination with functional soft materials would lead to innovative agricultural systems that can tackle the global issues of pollination.

show abstract

Flower Interaction Subsystem for a Precision Pollination Robot

Cited by 23 publications

References 31 publications

Development status and trend of agricultural robot technology

Development status and trend of agricultural robot technology

Replacing cheap nature? Sustainability, capitalist future-making and political ecologies of robotic pollination

Soap Bubble Pollination

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About