Washington State Year 3

September 12-23, 2011 - Week One, Carnegie Mellon University team members Brad Hamner, Jason Winters, and Ji Zhang along with Gustavo Freitas and Steve Nuske came to Wenatchee to test and gather data at Sunrise Research Orchard on several technologies in development:

- the Cascade autonomous platform in pace mode, bin-dog mode, with mounted control box, and iPad control with non-robotics users;

- localization using low-cost GPS and wheel odometry;

- and a vision system for crop yield estimation.

They were joined by Jillian Cannons of Vision Robotics Corp who, with the help of Gwen Hoheisel of Washington State University, collected data at Sunrise and other area orchards for the Scout's crop yield estimation.

Week Two, Karen Lewis, also of Washington State University, facilitated Phil Brown and Mike Rasch with DBR's Harvest Assist System trials.

Later in the week, we were joined by Sanjiv Singh, Marcel Bergerman, and Wenfan Shi from CMU who worked on the Automated Counter among other things.

On Thursday, we were joined by Johnny Park from Purdue, Henry Ngugi, Tara Baugher, Greg Krawczyk, and Brian Lehman from The Pennsylvania State University in a tour following apple harvest from "Tree-to-Truck" which started at a Washington Fruit orchard and ended at their packing house, with a nice Indian buffet lunch in between.

Friday was the CASC annual meeting. From breakfast through lunch at Confluence and Technology Center, updates and discussion on all the CASC themes occupied the members mentioned above as well as Vince Jones, George Kantor, Bill Messner, call-ins Katie Ellis, Art Lange, Clark Seavert, and Advisory Panel member Jim McFerson.

The final event was the field day at Sunrise to demonstrate four of the CASC technologies: electronic trap, driverless vehicle, automated tree counter, and DBR's harvest assist system. Over sixty people attended, a good time had by all. Click here to see short videos on each of the demos.