Karkee: Pollinator Work Latest Effort In Robotic Farming Research At WSU

Earlier this summer, the USDA announced a nearly $1 million grant for Washington State University to study the feasibility of robotic crop pollinators, which could help the tree fruit industry as bee colony collapse continues to be reported nationwide. WSU’s Manoj Karkee will lead the local team research, and noted this is just the most recent effort looking at what the future of farming may be.

“We are looking at harvesting, pruning, thinning,, chemical applications, and these other operations, as a potential operations for robotic solutions.”

He noted the crop pollination research becomes the latest component of their research to develop completely automated field operations.

“So this is one important project in the suit of projects that we carry out in automated or robotic farming operations and we are really excited about this new effort that we’ll be working on over the next three years.”

If you’d like to learn more about WSU’s robotic crop pollinator effort, Click Here, we have our entire conversation with Manoj Karkee for you there.

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