Speaker: A/Prof. Konstantinos Karydis (University of California, Riverside)
Title: Agricultural Robotics Technology to Support Sustainable Crop Production
Replay link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZlb7OKko_M
Time: Dec 13, 2023, at 10:00 am ACST (Tuesday, 12 December 2023 at 23:00:00, UTC). See the conversion to other time zones using this time zone announcement.
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Abstract: Agricultural robotics technology plays an increasingly significant role in precision agriculture. Besides remote sensing with aerial and ground robots, proximal sensing and physical interaction with the crop are gaining momentum as they can offer localized data to enable more informed agriculture decision support systems. Yet, proximal and physical sampling with agricultural mobile robots face several challenges. One relates to determining where to sample. Often, prior information maps (e.g., field soil moisture maps) are available but because of the dynamic nature of the problem these maps may not be trustworthy. This calls for task and motion planning methods that can harness prior information but not over-rely to it. Another relates to determining how to sample, which in most cases calls for an integrated design of actuation and perception to co-optimize robot performance, mobility and sampling.
This talk will cover some of our recent advances helping address both challenges. We will discuss task and motion planning whereby task costs are uncertain and the gain of completing a task is proportional to resource consumption (such as water consumption in precision irrigation). We will also discuss co-designed means for proximal sensing and physical sampling, with specific focus on measuring field apparent soil conductivity and designing a leaf retrieval mechanism to identify and cut leaves cleanly at their stem in tree crops for follow-on use on stem water potential analysis, respectively. We will demonstrate full-system integration and field deployment, and highlight some of our recent efforts to open-source dataset collection and digital twin creation to further support the growth of agricultural robotics research and practice.
Overall, this presentation sheds light on sensor technologies that are propelling the development of greenhouse robots, paving the way for more sophisticated and integrated agricultural automation systems. The incorporation of these advanced sensor technologies is poised to revolutionize greenhouse operations, boosting productivity, and fostering sustainable agriculture practices.
Bio: Dr. Konstantinos Karydis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), with cooperating faculty appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science and Engineering at UCR. Dr. Karydis is a recipient of a prestigious NSF CAREER Award in 2021, focusing on resilient autonomy of legged robots operating in agricultural fields. His research program addresses foundational robotics research problems underlying applications in precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and human-robot collaboration. His research seeks to enable diverse existing and new robot embodiments (and teams thereof) to operate in efficient and resilient manners autonomously and/or in cooperation with humans despite the presence of uncertainty associated with action, perception, and the operating environment.(Web: https://arcslab.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/KostasKarydis YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arcslab)