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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops (CASC) is a four-year project to develop crop intelligence and agricultural automation technologies for the apple and nursery tree industries. Supported by the USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative, CASC aims at impacting industry where it matters most: increasing production efficiency and reducing labor costs. In this paper we present our most recent results with the Autonomous Prime Movers, a family of reconfigurable vehicles designed to augment or automate a variety of orchard operations. We discuss the modifications made on the first APM to make it robust to uneven terrain and variance in canopy types, along with field tests that totaled 159 km in autonomous orchard driving. We also present the design and initial deployment of two new autonomous orchard platforms.

Keywords

Specialty crops, Efficiency improvement, Labor cost reduction, Crop intelligence, Agricultural automation, Autonomous orchard vehicle, Autonomous orchard platform.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Field Robotics Center

Associated Project(s): Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops

Number of pages: 11

Text Reference

Bradley Hamner, Marcel Bergerman, and Sanjiv Singh, "Autonomous Orchard Vehicles for Specialty Crops Production ," 2011 ASABE Annual International Meeting, July, 2011.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Hamner_2011_6886,
   author = "Bradley Hamner and Marcel Bergerman and Sanjiv Singh",
   title = "Autonomous Orchard Vehicles for Specialty Crops Production ",
   booktitle = "2011 ASABE Annual International Meeting",
   month = "July",
   year = "2011",
}

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