In August, Karen Lewis, WSU Extension, arranged a field trial for the Automated Caliper Measurement Unit at Cameron Nursery just south of Moses Lake, Washington.  Jim Owen, Area Lead and Heather Stoven, Technical Assistant, both from OSU Extension, joined Sanjiv Singh, Principle Investigator and Wenfan Shi, both from Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute for the field trial. Wenfan took time out to discuss with Mr. Cameron, the computer program that would provide analyses of information gathered from two light lasers housed in the unit. You can see the unit mounted on the side of the vehicle.

In October, Karen Lewis arranged a field trial of the cropload scout, Newton, at Hall Brothers' Orchard just south of Moses Lake. Tony Koselka, Jillian Cannons, and Ryan Carlon, of Vision Robotics Corporation (VRC) returned to Washington for further field trials of the Newton Scout, a vision-based system for automatic crop load assessment. Newton integrates stereo cameras with a custom image processing algorithm to count, locate and size red, blush and green varieties of apples.