Robotics

This course is part 2 of the Specialized Robotics Applications track, following Medical & Surgical Robotics and preceding Underwater & Marine Robotics. It looks at what happens when robots leave the controlled indoor world entirely and have to operate across acres of uneven, weather-exposed, biologically variable terrain, where no two plants are identical and the ground itself changes with every rainstorm. We cover why farm environments break the usual navigation and manipulation assumptions, how precision agriculture uses robots to treat individual plants instead of whole fields, how field robots navigate open rows versus dense canopy, why harvesting delicate produce remains one of robotics' most stubborn unsolved manipulation problems, and why the economics of farming produce such a wide spread of robot designs, from small weeding bots to enormous autonomous tractors. It assumes familiarity with general autonomous navigation, SLAM, and actuator concepts from earlier courses, and applies them specifically to agriculture rather than re-teaching them.