"SNU-Bot", an agricultural harvesting robot team supervised by Hak-jin Kim, a professor of Biosystems engineering at Seoul National University, won the second place at 2023 Robotic Student Design Competition organized by American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE).

The Robot Competition was sponsored by the American Cotton Production Association, agricultural machinery companies John Deere and CLASS as part of the annual ASABE conference side event held in Omaha, Nebraska, the U.S., from July 9-12, 2023. A total of 14 teams participated this year, and in the Advanced Division involving the Seoul National University team, Cornell University, University of Florida, McGill University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Zhejiang University participated in the competition. The competition is a robot with a size of around 30 × 30 × 30 cm produced by each participating team, and its main mission was to autonomously harvest cotton installed in a 2.4 × 2.4 m stadium without human intervention, and to detect unripe cotton as the robot moves and create the map.

Seoul National University team (graduate student Yong-Hyun Kim, Gyujin Jang, Chulwhan Yoon, Seongje Moon) performed well in their first competition, and despite the lack of preparation period for the competition, they moved autonomously to accurately detect and harvest the cotton's location.

Seoul National University team struggled with robot parts and power transmission problems just before the competition, but overcame them well and realized the autonomous movement of the manipulator while moving without human intervention, and showed technology to accurately harvest individual cotton.

Yong-Hyun Kim, a graduate student at Seoul National University, said, "There were many difficulties because it was my first participation, but I think it led to the second-place because I did not give up and the teamwork among the team members was so good." Professor Hak-Jin Kim of Seoul National University, who has been leading the SNU-Bot team and preparing for the competition, said, "The fact that the unevenly growing cotton position was accurately recognized and the manipulator and gripper operation were precise, which means that the developed AI image processing algorithm was successful, and we expect that it will greatly contribute to the development of agricultural harvesting robots based on this.

Source : https://cals.snu.ac.kr/board/news?bm=v&bbsidx=11808