Abstract

Agricultural irrigation consumes 70% of the world's freshwater. Emerging sensing technologies such as UAVs equipped with heterogeneous sensors can provide farmers with detailed maps of water use and ground conditions, but closing the sensing-actuation loop to adjust irrigation at the plant level remains an unsolved challenge. Some proposed solutions rely on networks of motorized wireless actuators that are costly and prone to failure in field conditions. RAPID (Robot-Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery) explores an alternative approach whereby humans and robots collaborate to adjust low-cost, adjustable drip irrigation emitters at the plant level. RAPID is designed for cost-conscious farm managers to be retrofit to existing irrigation systems and incrementally expanded to increase irrigation precision, reduce water usage, and permit thousands of emitters to be incrementally adjusted. The project involves the design, development, and evaluation in the field of robust co-robotic systems compatible with existing drip irrigation infrastructure in vineyards and orchards.  After giving an overview of the project, in this talk I will illustrate a set of results in the area of routing in vineyards for single and multiple robots.

Bio

Stefano Carpin is Professor and founding chair of the department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Merced. He received his “Laurea” (MSc) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Padova (Italy) in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Since 2007 he has been with the School of Engineering at UC Merced, where he established and leads the UC Merced robotics laboratory.  His research interests include mobile and cooperative robotics, and robot algorithms. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and served as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Under his supervision, teams participating in the RoboCupRescue Virtual Robots competition won second place in 2006 and 2008, and first place in 2009. In 2018, he also won the Best Conference Paper Award at the yearly IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). Since he joined UC Merced his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, USDA, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Lab, the Department of Commerce (NIST), the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Microsoft Research, and General Motors.