USDA Awards WSU Robotic Crop Pollinator Effort Awarded Nearly $1M

Washington State University scientists working on developing robotic crop pollination technology recently received a nearly $1 million grant from the USDA. Associate professor in WSU’s Department of Biological Systems Engineering Manoj Karkee said they started looking at the feasibility of this technology because of growing concerns and needs reported by those in the tree fruit industry and others.

“Because off these challenges of finding enough pollinators, and also because of the challenges weather and environmental factors play in the pollinating process, we wanted to investigate the possibility of actually using robots to do the same.”

Karkee added this research will build on the nearly ten years of robotics in Ag work taking place at WSU. He noted this recent USDA funding will help WSU work with researchers from Penn State. Karkee said challenging and revolutionary effort like this require a diverse group of researchers.

“For example in this particular case we must have a computer scientist, or a robotics kind of background, we must have a horticultural background, and we certainly need to have an engineering background, all in place in order to do something like this.  Also, multi-state efforts are important to understand the problems and stakeholder interests and needs in different parts of the country, so when we develop something like this, and we work on something like this, we have a much wider prospective on the problem.”

The grant from the USDA runs for three years.

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