The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $1,007,682 Federal Grant under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to the Regents of the University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside). The project, titled "Collaborative Research: Elevating Farm Worker-Robot Collaborations in Agri-Food Ecosystems", aims to shape the future of farm work by developing human-aware agricultural robots that can seamlessly partner with farmworkers to improve tree-crop harvesting outcomes and productivity. The 4-year project will investigate novel principles for safe and efficient robotic harvesters, effective machine vision methods to understand farmworker activities, planning techniques accounting for human actions, a participatory design approach for precision farming technology trust and adoption, and human-robot multitasking toward sustainable agriculture. The project actively engages stakeholders like farmworkers, farm owners, and packing house specialists to integrate their feedback and inform iterative modifications of the robotic systems. The research seeks to explore the implications of future agricultural robotics technology on the agriculture workforce, including potential impacts on compensation schemes and technology ownership.
Mod # | Description | Reason For Modification | Federal Obligation (Click to sort descending) | Date (Click to sort ascending) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not listed | $1.0m | 9/19/23 |