Abstract
By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Robotics & Machine Learning Daily News Daily News-Investigators discuss new findings in Robotics. According to news reporting out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by NewsRx editors, research stated, "Monitoring crop nutrients can aid farmers in optimiz ing fertilizer use. Many existing robots rely on vision-based phenotyping, howev er, which can only indirectly estimate nutrient deficiencies once crops have und ergone visible color changes." Financial support for this research came from National Science Foundation (NSF). Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Carnegie Mellon Uni versity, "We present a contact-based phenotyping robot platform that can directl y insert nitrate sensors into cornstalks to proactively monitor macronutrient le vels in crops. This task is challenging because inserting such sensors requires sub-centimeter precision in an environment which contains high levels of clutter , lighting variation, and occlusion. To address these challenges, we develop a r obust perception-action pipeline to grasp stalks, and create a custom robot grip per which mechanically aligns the sensor before inserting it into the stalk. Thr ough experimental validation on 48 unique stalks in a cornfield in Iowa, we demo nstrate our platform's capability of detecting a stalk with 94% su ccess, grasping a stalk with 90% success, and inserting a sensor w ith 60% success."
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