Speaker: Abhisesh Silwal

Title: Robotics and AI for Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract:
Production agriculture plays a critical role in our lives, providing food security and enabling sustainability. Despite its immense importance, it currently faces many challenges including shortage of farmworkers, increasing production costs, excess use of herbicides just to name a few. Robotics and artificial intelligence-based technologies have the potential to increase the efficiency, long-term sustainability, safety, and profitability of agricultural production methods. Application of these advanced technologies often leads to proof-of-concept robotic systems that demonstrate novel concepts to do things that have never been done before. In this talk, I will showcase some of my recent research efforts towards robot enabled agricultural systems ranging from imaging systems that enable robust perception in the outdoor, autonomous robots for time critical tasks such as weeding, pruning, phenotyping etc., to robot systems for vertical farming. I will discuss key lessons learned implementing these systems in commercial farms, while highlighting its complexity and challenges it presents to robotics, but also the societal benefit it offers through technological advancements. Finally, I will provide some thought on key research challenges looking forward and envision the next generations of agricultural robot systems that we should build focusing on low-cost designs, general purpose use, and entrepreneurship.

Bio:
Abhisesh Silwal (Abhi) is a Senior Project Scientist at the Field Robotics Center, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Before this appointment, he also completed his post-doctoral fellowship from CMU, received his Ph.D. from Washington State University and holds a Master’s degree in Mechatronics Engineering, and an Undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. His research interest includes systems research at the intersection of multi-disciplines of robotics including perception, navigation, manipulation and Artificial Intelligence. His research aim is to bring the state of the art from all disciplines of robotics to provide robust robotic solutions to agricultural and field robotics problems.