Speakers
Prof. George Kantor
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Talk title: A path to dexterous manipulation in agriculture
Bio: George Kantor is a Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. He has over 20 years of research experience in developing and deploying robotic technologies for real-world applications in military, agriculture, mining, and scientific exploration. His technical interests lie in position estimation and mapping for mobile robots, control of robotic systems with nontrivial dynamics, off-road autonomous driving, and deep learning for image analysis and sensor fusion "on the edge". In the agriculture domain, his group has developed mobile robots for in-field phenotyping, perception pipelines for creating dense 3D plant models, and reinforcement learning approaches for robotics manipulation in tree canopies.
Prof. Takanori Fukao
Department of Mechano-Informatics
The University of Tokyo
Talk title: Automated Agricultural Robot Systems: From Harvest to Transportation
Bio: Takanori Fukao received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1992, 1994, and 2001. From 1996 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University. From 2004 to 2015, he was an Associate Professor at Kobe University. From 2015 to 2020, he was a Professor at Ritsumeikan University. Since 2020, he has been a Professor at the University of Tokyo. From 2001 to 2003, he was also a Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. His main research interests include field robotics and automotive control.
Dr. Emmanuela Del Dottore
Italian Institute of Technology
Talk title: Bioinspired Robots for Precision Agriculture
Bio: Dr. Emanuela Del Dottore is a Research Scientist in Bioinspired Soft Robotics at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Italy. With a background in Computer Science (University of Pisa) and a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa), she works on the development of control and decision-making strategies for bioinspired robots based on plants growth behaviors. Dr. Del Dottore has contributed to writing successful regional and international project proposals and participated in their development. These include, for instance, FET-OPEN FP7-ICT PLANTOID (G.A. 293431), FET-PROACT GROWBOT (G.A. 824074), ERC I-WOOD, POR FESR Toscana SMASH. She is co-advisor of several Ph.D. students, fellows, research interns, and postdocs working in plant-inspired robotics, growing robots, and soft robotics. Dr. Del Dottore is currently working on analyzing plant behaviors to implement plant-inspired computational models useful for the distributed control and communication of multi-agent systems. Her goal is to extract functional rules from natural living systems and implement similar functionalities to enable efficient compliance and adaptation in robotic artifacts to explore and monitor unstructured and mutable environments.
Prof. Joe Davidson
Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering
Oregon State University
Talk title: Tactile perception for manipulation in orchards
Bio: Joe Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at Oregon State University, where he directs the Intelligent Machines & Materials Lab. He co-leads the Labor Intelligence research program in the NSF-USDA NIFA-funded AgAID AI Institute and also serves on the leadership team for the “Orchard of the Future” international collaboration. His research interests include robotic manipulation, tactile sensing, and dynamics and control.
Prof. Marcelo Becker
São Carlos School of Engineering
University of São Paulo
Talk title: Agricultural Robotics in Brazil: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities
Bio: Marcelo Becker graduated in Mechanical Engineering with an emphasis in Mechatronics from the School of Engineering of São Carlos - University of São Paulo (EESC-USP) in 1993. He completed his master's and doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the State University of Campinas (FEM-Unicamp), respectively in 1997 and 2000. He did a Post-Doctorate at the Autonomous Systems Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - EPFL, Switzerland (2005-2006). He is currently an Associate Professor 3 at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the School of Engineering of São Carlos - University of São Paulo (SEM-EESC-USP), Leader of the Mobile Robotics Group at SEM-EESC-USP and Coordinator and Member of the Board of Directors of CRob-SC (São Carlos Robotics Center). He works in the areas of Mechatronic Engineering, with an emphasis on Automation, Robotics, Mobile Robotics, Perception Systems, and Design of Mechatronic Systems. His projects currently focus on Agriculture and Industrial Automation.
Prof. Maren Bennewitz
University of Bonn
Talk title: Active Perception for Fruit Mapping and Autonomous Harvesting
Bio: Maren Bennewitz is professor for Computer Science at the University of Bonn, Germany, and head of the Humanoid Robots Lab. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and regularly serves as editor or associate editor for top-tier robotics conferences as well as in the editorial board of top-tier robotics journals, She has been PI in several national and European projects and she is also on the Executive Board of the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob -- Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production. One research focuses of her group is on coverage of crops with a robot's sensors to learn 3D models over time to monitor the plant growth and enable harvesting.
Gonzalo Mier Muñoz
Wageningen University & Research
Talk title: Phenotyping technology adoption and our quest to cope with climate change
Bio: Gonzalo Mier is a robotics engineer doing his PhD on agricultural Coverage Path Planning at Wageningen University & Research. On his PhD, Gonzalo researches about techniques to find optimal paths to drive machinery through a field.
Prof. Elizabeth Sklar
University of Lincoln
Talk title: Collaborative Robotic Systems for Sustainable Food Production
Bio: Elizabeth Sklar, PhD, is Professor of Agri-Robotics and Research Director at the Lincoln Institute for Agri-food Technology (LIAT) at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has held previous academic posts at King's College London, the City University of New York (US) and Columbia University (US). Her research investigates the implementation of AI-based methods in the context of multi-robot teams, human-machine teaming, data-backed decision making and behaviour mining. Since joining LIAT in 2019, she has been exploring the application of these methodologies within the agri-food pipeline through the development of intelligent agri-food systems that incorporate autonomous robots and multi-agent systems for collaborative farming and food production. Prof Sklar's work has been funded by the UK research councils (EPSRC, ESRC and MRC/BBSRC), Innovate UK, US National Science Foundation and a US-UK Fulbright fellowship. She has published over 200 papers in refereed venues and edited two books.
Prof. Abraham Stroock
Cornell University
Talk title: The need to automate intimate interactions with programmable plants
Bio: Abraham Stroock is the Gordon L. Dibble ’50 Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. He is the director of the Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS), a transdisciplinary research center working on developing tools to listen to and communicate with plants and the associated organisms that comprise their microbiomes.The Stroock lab focuses on manipulating dynamics and chemical processes on micrometer scales. Current efforts in the lab relate to 1) the study and application of mechanisms for manipulating liquids inspired by plants, 2) fundamental studies of the properties of liquid water at negative pressure, 3) studies of the biophysical processes that control vascular development and applications of these processes in tissue engineering, and 4) theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies of fluid mechanical processes on small scales for chemical process.
Prof. James Schnable
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Talk title: Adding dimensions to phenotype reshapes efforts to link genetics and crop performance
Bio: James Schnable's group at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln focuses on the quantitative genetics and breeding of corn, sorghum, and other related crops. Using a combination of advanced genomic, phenomic and machine learning technologies his team is identifying specific genes in crops that improve both the agronomic properties and food quality/value of crop plants. In his eight years at the University, he has established three companies in the fields of bioinformatics, climate-resilient agriculture, and precision agronomy, raised over $7 million in funding from angel and venture investors, and secured more than $20M funding for his research program from a wide range of government agencies and organizations including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foundation for Food and Agricultural research, for-profit companies and NGOs. Dr. Schnable recently returned to the University of Nebraska after a leave of absence to work at X, a division of Google that develops and implements “moonshot” technologies to make the world a radically better place.
Prof. Brian Bailey
University of California, Davis
Talk title: Simulation of plant function and automatically annotated synthetic visible, multi/hyperspectral, thermal, and depth imagery using the Helios 3D plant modeling framework
Dr. Brian Bailey comes from an interdisciplinary background that spans the fields of engineering, computer science, and plant biology. He received his PhD in mechanical engineering, which focused on better understanding the physics of turbulence and energy transfer in plant systems. Prior to joining the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis in 2016, he worked at the USDA-ARS in Corvallis, OR on the development of improved biophysical models of grape powdery mildew spread. His current research program has focused on merging his interests in biometeorology and plant physiology in order to develop the next-generation of physically-based 3D crop models that predict system-level responses to management practices and environmental variability. Recent projects have been aimed at using the 3D models to generate synthetic imagery data to enhance machine learning model training for detection of physiological and architectural plant traits.
Dr. Alfredo Argiolas
YANMAR R&D Europe
Talk title: YANMAR: Robotics Technologies for agriculture - Towards sustainable food production
Alfredo Argiolas is a researcher at YANMAR R&D Europe, Florence, Italy. His work focuses on the smartification of YANMAR machines (mainly construction machines, such as excavators, and agricultural machines, such as tractors) utilizing robotics technologies and developing new devices and robots for construction and agriculture. After receiving his MSc in Biomedical Engineering at Pisa University (2012), he started a Ph.D. in BioRobotics in Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna at the CMBR of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Dr. Barbara Mazzolai group). After a period as Visiting Researcher in the Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell University (Prof. Robert Shepherd's group), he received his Ph.D. (2016) with a dissertation on the study and development of bioinspired osmotic actuators for robotics applications.
Abdullah Zawawi Mohamed
Head of Robotics and Product Development
Sime Darby Plantation
Talk title: Advancements of Robotics Technology in Oil Palm Plantation Industry
Bio: Abdullah Zawawi is currently the head of robotics and product development at Sime Darby Plantation Berhad. His mission is to develop robotics solutions that can help Sime Darby Plantation Berhad increase operational efficiency and reduce reliance on foreign workers in their operations. Before joining Sime Darby Plantation Berhad, he was the first robotics engineer at PETRONAS and was responsible for developing autonomous drones for oil and gas applications. Zawawi also spent several years with IT companies as a presales consultant and data scientist. Zawawi earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan.