The Vision Robotics SCOPE team will conceptualize, design, and prototype an automated fruit picking end effector for use by the tree fruit industry. The design will include considerations for low production costs, a life time on the order of millions of cycles, and a picking time of less than a second.
The team studied the marketplace and design space around location-based services for mobile devices, and found that the increasing fidelity and decreasing cost of location-sensing technology provides an opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity, the team developed a prototype location platform that collects data about the movements of users. They tested this prototype through field trials and user interviews, and further developed applications that leverage the capabilities offered by the platform. To be of value to the sponsor, the team also developed commercialization plans for the designed platform and applications.
The current generation of man portable unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) often pose problems for researchers due to high unit price points and closed development architectures. Each UGV becomes a major investment for a research group and discourages heavy use under harsh field conditions, while closed software environments hinder necessary modifications. The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) approached the 2011-2012 Olin SCOPE Program with these problems in mind and asked the team to produce a man portable autonomous UGV for use as a research platform. The goals o the project focus on the development and production of a low-cost indoor/outdoor UGV that provides a modular interface for the rapid development of cutting edge software and sensor capabilities.