Carnegie Mellon University

Agriculture

NREC develops robotic solutions and autonomous agricultural equipment for field and specialty crop applications. NREC has worked with the USDA, farmers, and equipment manufacturers to support the development of advanced harvesting, crop sorting, disease detection and monitoring equipment for the agricultural industry. With the shortage of farm workers, you can turn to NREC to create custom solutions for planting, pruning, thinning, weeding, yield estimate, harvesting or processing.

Capabilities

Equipment Automation

Autonomous Tractors and Combine Harvesters

Harvesting

Automating Fruit and Vegetable Harvesters

Crop Detection

Yield Monitoring, Crop Inventory, and Disease Detection

Autonomous Processing

Sorting, Grading, and Packaging

Safety Systems

Collision Avoidance and Human Detection

GPS-Denied Navigation

Tractor Navigation and Worker Localization, under canopy or down in the valley

Applications

Autonomous Equipment

Robotic Harvesting

Weeding

Pruning

Yield Estimation

Processing & Packing

Peat Moss Harvesting

NREC developed an add-on perception system for automating peat moss harvesting

Automated Tree Inventories by the National Robotics Engineering Center

Automated Tree Inventories

NREC developed a tree inventory system using vehicle-mounted sensors to automatically count and map the locations of trees in an orchard

Other Agriculture Projects

Active Fill Control

Active Fill Control

Active Fill Control is an automation product simplifying the unloading process in John Deere’s Self Propelled Forage Harvesters (SPFH) for 8000 Series model year 2016 or later.

Grain Quality

Grain Quality

 The Grain Quality Monitor is a vision and learning-based approach for detecting and estimating the composition of grain flowing through a combine harvester.

Human Detection and Tracking

Human Detection and Tracking

NREC developed advanced machine vision techniques for safety around agricultural vehicles. Robotics offers the opportunity to improve efficiency on the farm, but these systems must reliably detect other workers to ensure their safety.

Vehicle Safeguarding

Vehicle Safeguarding

NREC developed a fully autonomous system capable of following pre-taught paths while detecting and avoiding obstacles.