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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Production of nursery crops in the US is accomplished in container- and field-growing conditions, with propagation and seedling-rearing carried out in greenhouses. The USDA, NASA and the ANLA have collaborated to develop an automated in-field container-handling system for reducing dependence on foreign labor while also increasing productivity. A prototype system was developed at CMU, capable of automatically lifting and conveying plants from. the ground (in a variety of regular patterns) onto trailers, and vice-versa. The system is capable of handling a vast array of container-designs from different manufacturers, and spans the size-range from #1 to #3 (approximate equivalence to US gallons). The system is designed to handle 35, 000 containers per 8-hour day with one to two operators. Field-trials currently underway has shown the system to reliably handle 29, 000 #1 containers per 8-hour day with less than a 3% failure-rate. Testing in various growth-zones and surfaces is underway, with commercialization efforts in Europe/US.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: National Robotics Engineering Center

Associated Project(s): Container Handling and Automated Field-Container Handling System

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Hagen Schempf and Todd Graham, "Junior: a robot for outdoor container nurseries," Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE / RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '02), October, 2002, pp. 750 - 755.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Schempf_2002_4525,
   author = "Hagen Schempf and Todd Graham",
   title = "Junior: a robot for outdoor container nurseries",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE / RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '02)",
   pages = "750 - 755",
   month = "October",
   year = "2002",
   volume = "1",
}

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