Mark your calendars! The Illinois Autonomous Farm (IAF) is hosting an in-person workshop on July 7th from 8:00am-5:00pm at the Illinois Autonomous Farm (3603 S Race St., Urbana, Illinois 61802) with a social event following at Big Grove Tavern. The workshop will also have a Zoom available during the presentation times for those who cannot attend in-person.
The IAF workshop will focus on current research that is happening on the farm in areas such as Autonomous navigation, plant manipulation and AI for robotics. It will also include demos of the new Farmbot, robot demos and the hybrid-arm demo. It also features plenty of opportunities for networking and learning about exciting challenges at the intersection of agriculture, autonomy, and AI.
A key reason to attend, even if you do not yet have a project at the IAF, is to network with the community of researchers working there, and meet future project collaborators. As such, we highly welcome broad and diverse participation.
- 8:30-9:00am Breakfast available
- 9:00-9:10am: Welcome and overview
- 9:10-9:40am: Dr. Adam Davis, Department Head, Crop Sciences, UIUC
- 9:40-10:00am: Dr. Ronaldo Maghirang, Department Head, Agricultural & Biological Engineering, UIUC
- 10:00-10:30am: Break
- 10:30-11:45am: Autonomous navigation presentations
- Chengzheng Yu—Economic Incentives for Adoption of Semi-Autonomous Robots for Weed Control in Corn-Soybean Systems
- Mateus Gasparino—Multi-Sensor Fusion based Robust Row Following for Compact Agricultural Robots
- Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar—Learned Visual Navigation for Under-Canopy Agricultural Robots
- Hashim Sharif— ApproxRobotics: The Cost and Accuracy Tradeoff for Small Mobile Robots
- Tianchen Ji—Multi-Modal Failure Detection for Uncertain Field Environments
- Anwesa Choudhuri—Structured Prediction on Top-K Assignments for Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation
- 12:00pm-1:15pm: Keynote Speaker: Dr. George Kantor, Carnegie Mellon University, Lunch (provided)
- 1:15- 2:30pm: Plant manipulation presentations
- Benjamin Walt—A Berry Picking Robot With A Hybrid Soft-Rigid Arm: Design and Task Space Control
- Shivani Kamtikar—Addressing Accuracy Issues in Soft Pneumatic Arms using Visual Servoing
- Samhita Marri—Grasp Detection for Berry Harvesting
- Junzhe Wu—Leaf Angle Estimation with Sensor Fusion
- Garvita Allabadi—FedSSL: A Framework for Object Detection Leveraging Semi Supervised and Federated Learning
- 2:30-3:15pm: Demos of the Farmbot, robots, and hybrid-arm/Break
- 3:15-4:30pm: AI for robotics
- Peixin Chang— Robot Sound Interpretation: Representation Learning for Verbal Robot Commands
- Qingyun Wang—An Intelligent Tutor for Amateur Farmers
- Daniel Kiv—smol: Sensing Soil Moisture using LoRa
- Kulbir Ahluwalia—Pasture Monitoring in Simulated Environments
- Guy Roger Aby—Safety Risk Assessment of the Usage of Robots in Agriculture
- 5:00-7:00pm: Social Event at Big Grove Tavern (1 East Main St, Champaign, IL 61820)
We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!