Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** the shortage of natural pollinators…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** the shortage of natural pollinators is threatening global food production, making IT increasingly difficult to feed the ever-growing human population on earth. Robotic pollinators can supplement insect pollinators to improve food security. They can provide additional services such as mapping and flower data collection. Robotic pollinators will also work in controlled environments not suitable for natural pollinators. To help realize these benefits, the objectives of this project are to 1) significantly improve the effectiveness and 2) lower the entry barrier of robotic pollination technology. The project aims to address several research challenges associated with precision robotic pollination: the spatial-temporal development of crops and flowers, the similarity of flowers in a cluster, the unstructured plants with occlusions, the large number of flowers needed to be pollinated, among others.to meet these challenges, the design of a six-armed precision robotic pollinator for greenhouse environments, stickbug, is proposed. Systematic field experiments are designed to evaluate stickbug's pollination effectiveness and its ability to work alongside human growers.