Autonomous Food Production

Growing food in space will not only allow us to extend the length of future missions in space, but also significantly increase the astronauts' well-being. The proposed research focus on the fundamental sensing and manipulation challenges of automating parts of the operations of in-space greenhouses to facilitate tele-operation. Specifically, we are investigating machine learning techniques to extract the growth stage of plants from a combination of volumetric, color, and infrared data, and novel algorithms for manipulating flexible structures using two arms, much like a human gardener does when picking a fruit. More »