Urbana, Illinois
February 23, 2007
University of Illinois students will be harvesting and
transporting “crops” with equipment that can steer itself this
coming March 9 and 10 in the Agricultural Engineering Sciences
Building in Urbana. What’s more, they will be performing these
complex operations within a 12-foot by 8-foot space as part of
the ExplorACES
Open House.
How can they pull off such a technological trick?
With miniature equipment, to begin with.
For ExplorACES, these students have been given the challenge of
creating a miniature autonomous harvesting operation using one
harvester and two unloading carts.
"The goal is to have the harvester send a wireless message to
the unloading cart when the hopper is full,” said Tony Grift, a
U of I agricultural engineer heading up the project. “The
unloading cart will pull up next to the harvester and unload it.
Then the harvester continues while the unloading cart drives to
a location where it dumps its load and makes itself ready for
the next cycle."
The harvester will not actually harvest anything, said Grift; it
will be filled manually when its hopper is empty. Soft plastic
pellets will represent the harvested material. Communication
between the harvester and the unloading carts must be wireless,
but there are no limits for the number of nodes or messages that
can be transmitted.
Although the harvester and the unloading carts can be any size
the students wish, they are not allowed to venture beyond the
12-foot by 8-foot floor space allotted.
Grift says the challenge requires much from the students. "They
have to think about system optimization, auto-guidance, material
transport, synchronization and synergy," he said.
Grift is also the chair of the newly formed Agricultural
Robotics Committee within the American Society of Agricultural
and Biological Engineers (ASABE). The committee is proposing a
new student agricultural robotics competition for ASABE, and
Grift and several of his students will be offering a
demonstration of their autonomous harvesting operation at the
group’s 2007 international meeting in June as a way to jumpstart
the proposed competition.
"We envision a competition that travels with the annual meeting
and allows for challenges that are in tune with the local
agricultural infrastructure," Grift said, "such as picking
grapes in California, scouting for insects in the midwestern
corn fields and milking cows in Wisconsin."
Grift concluded, "We hope to encounter true gems of innovation
among the solutions to these challenges. We believe competitions
like this one give students an optimistic, exciting view of
agriculture in the future." |
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