Abstract:

Biological and agricultural environments are dynamic, unstructured, and uncertain, posing challenges for environmental data collection at the necessary spatial and temporal scales to enable meaningful systems analysis. Small unmanned systems, however, can overcome some of these challenges by enabling autonomous or human-assisted image-based and in situ environmental data collection. This talk will present a suite of new assistive technologies that leverage robotics and computer vision to broaden sensing and sense-making across different types of biological and agricultural environments. Demonstrative case studies in each system will be presented, including high-throughput, autonomous, mobile phenotyping of row crops and focused human-robot interaction studies for aerial telemanipulation. The material covered in this talk will illustrate how the strategic, user-focused design of robotics and automated systems to accomplish unique environmental data collection can enable better understanding and decision-making for dynamic biological systems.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Sierra Young is an Assistant Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at North Carolina State University, focusing on the use of robotics and automation for sensing and sense-making in agricultural and natural systems, and human-robot interaction for small unmanned systems. Before arriving at North Carolina State, she worked as a Visiting Scholar in the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department at Iowa State University. Dr. Young received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering as a Department of Defense NDSEG Fellow with a focus on the human-robot interaction for physical object manipulation by small unmanned aerial systems from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018.