Agriculture accounts for 12% of Washington’s economy and employs over 160,000 people in a state which leads national productions in 11 different commodities, including apples, pears, hops, and red raspberries. Washington State has a particularly large share of the domestic raspberry crop, producing 95% of the nation’s raspberries, with 93% of the number produced in Whatcom County alone.

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A biennial raspberry crop is managed through many pruning and harvest methods. Many of these pruning methods involve selective pruning of 1-year old raspberry canes (floricanes) to limit total plant density, and suppression of young raspberry canes (primocanes) to prevent them from competing with the fruiting floricanes. These operations are typically accomplished through manual pruning and herbicide application, respectively, in the field, the desire for farmers to cut labor costs and use fewer chemicals on their crops opens the door for new methods of accomplishing these necessary production tasks.

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The Robotics Design Competition, held annually by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers aims to find new concepts in automating tasks in agriculture. This competition allows undergraduate and graduate students to develop skills in robotic systems, electronics, and sensing technologies by simulating a fully autonomous robotics solution to a common agricultural process. The competition requires teams to build a robot, or group of cooperative robots, which accomplish a simulated pre-, peri-, or post-harvest agricultural operation. The robots must be fully autonomous and able to complete the task without human intervention. The robots are small, less than 12”x12”x12”, and the challenge is typically executed on a custom-fabricated table. In past years, robots have been required to simulate counting and sorting, pick-up, pruning, transport, and precision-maneuvering operations.

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The challenge for 2017's competition was to simulate a full primocane suppression and selective floricane removal pruning operation using autonomous robots. The competition required teams to develop robots that can identify primocanes and floricanes, selectively cut irregularly distributed primocanes and floricanes to a given row density, and remove the cut plant material from the rows to clear debris. This project was accomplished in the spring of 2017 with the assistance of the HuskerBot Robotics team, which included the following members: J. Wynn, A. Atefi, P. Pandey, L. D. Renker, and C. Liew. The project was guided by Dr. Santosh Pitla, associate professor at the Department of Biological System Engineering at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The design methodology adopted by the team can be summarized in the following areas:

 

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