Speaker: Joe Davidson

Assistant Professor, Robotics

College of Engineering

Oregon State University

The world’s population is expected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050. To feed this growing population, the world will need to grow more food. While the production of row crops has been heavily mechanized, the fresh market tree fruit industry still relies on large, seasonal workforces – every apple at the grocery store was picked by a human hand. However, for multiple reasons, there is increasing uncertainty about the future availability of agricultural workers. Though researchers and companies have been working on fruit harvesting robots since the 1980s, today there are still no robotic tree fruit harvesters commercially available. In this talk I’ll describe why it has been so difficult to get robots working in orchards, especially harvesting fruit. I’ll also summarize ongoing research at OSU on teaching robots how to pick apples.

To attend this event online, please use this registration link https://www.eventbrite.com/e/science-pub-corvallis-virtual-tickets-439857444457.

For more info visit Science Pub Night.

Science Pub is sponsored by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, the Old World Deli and Oregon State University.