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
Applications
Autonomous Equipment
Robotic Harvesting
Weeding
Pruning
Yield Estimation
Processing & Packing
Featured Projects
Specialty Crop Automation
NREC and John Deere teamed to build unmanned tractors to perform grove operations such as spraying and mowing
Strawberry Plant Sorter
NREC built an automated strawberry plant sorter that streamlines the harvesting process
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 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
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
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
NREC developed a fully autonomous system capable of following pre-taught paths while detecting and avoiding obstacles.