This $175,000 SBIR Program Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (CFDA 10.212) to L5 Automation Inc. aims to develop an automated strawberry characteristics assessor. The system will use a mix of classical, deep learning, and geometric vision techniques to rapidly and accurately assess key attributes of strawberries, including ripeness, damage, shape, and size. This research lays the foundation for a robotic strawberry harvesting...
The University of Florida was awarded a $573,938 Project Grant by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) program. The grant will fund the design, development, and evaluation of autonomous weed management robots with integrated precision herbicide application technology for use in specialty crop production, such as vegetables and strawberries. The key objectives are to enhance grass weed...
The University of Florida received a $499,730 Project Grant award from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) competitive grants program. The grant will fund research from March 2021 to March 2025 to develop an imaging approach called FRESHID to objectively evaluate post-harvest quality attributes of fresh fruits and vegetables, such as maturity, storage ability, and firmness. Researchers...
The University of Florida Division of Sponsored Research was awarded a $582,187 project grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The funding will support a 4-year research project to identify genetic variations and genes associated with resistance to the soilborne diseases Phytophthora crown rot and charcoal rot in cultivated strawberry. The goal is to employ conventional breeding strategies and...
The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded a $649,189 Project Grant through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) to the University of Florida (UF) Division of Sponsored Research. The grant supports the development of data science tools and AI-based models to facilitate breeding cotton germplasm with improved yield and quality characteristics. Key objectives include managing heterogeneous field data, developing real-time video tracking...
The University of Florida was awarded a $747,671 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program (AFRI, CFDA No. 10.310). The four-year project aims to enhance modeling of broadleaf weed emergence across diverse agricultural regions in the southeastern U.S. through several key deliverables. Researchers will develop deep learning models to detect and identify...
The University of Florida (UF) is the recipient of a $748,119 Project Grant from the Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (AFRI program, CFDA 10.310). The grant will fund the development and delivery of non-formal education and experiential learning curricula for youth aged 14-18 in artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, and other emerging agricultural technologies. The curricula will be designed to inspire and engage youth in the sustainable...
This federal Project Grant award, provided by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310), aims to develop methods to improve the accuracy of yield monitor data and evaluate their effectiveness. The $591,250 grant, awarded to Mississippi State University on September 15, 2024, supports a 3-year project to create an open-source AI tool to detect and correct errors in raw yield data from precision...
The University of California, Davis was awarded a $877,553 federal Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (CFDA 10.332 - Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative) on September 1, 2024. The grant will fund research to advance the understanding of fruit quality genetics and the relationship between fruit quality metrics and consumer preferences for strawberries. Key objectives include developing, testing, and releasing strawberry...
The University of Florida was awarded a $488,754 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems to develop a unifying stochastic framework for temporally consistent computer vision models. The four-year award, made on January 1, 2022 under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering federal grant program (CFDA #47.070), will support research to combine sequential Monte Carlo methods with neural networks. This will create a trainable...