Tanner Research, Inc. — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.13

Description

The demand for affordable, nutritious, and delicious strawberries continues to grow while the availability of manual field laborers continues to decline. Current strawberry picking operations require the picker to spend time carrying each picked box of strawberries to the edge of the field to a collection station. Our proposed autonomous four-wheeled strawberry transport robot could carry the picked boxes of strawberries out of the field while the picker continues to pick. In this way, the picker can pick more and thus earn more, and the farmer can save money by picking the same number of strawberries with fewer laborers or the farmer can increase production with the same labor. We are designing the robots to be so light weight that they will not be a danger to the pickers.In order for the robots to save money by replacing human time, the robots must be inexpensive. We have designed a low cost platform using plastic components and we use low cost electric motors developed for high-volume consumer products. During this effort, we will utilize our software expertise as well as the robotics knowledge from our Caltech partners in order to design the guidance system for the autonomous robot so that it can follow the furrows in the strawberry field, avoid collisions, and transport the strawberries to the collection station without human intervention. The availability of powerful computers at affordable prices, allows for the first time the sophistication of autonomous operation at a cost such that increasing the production of a manual laborer is economical.We expect that trials with the robots developed under this project will demonstrate an increase in productivity of the human pickers of 50%. Strawberry farmers in our area understand the economics of automated transport very well and are eagerly anticipating using the robots developed under this effort.