{"id":174905,"date":"2026-06-11T09:30:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T13:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=174905"},"modified":"2026-06-10T13:04:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T17:04:55","slug":"bu-robotics-club-wins-first-prize-and-audience-choice-award-at-annual-robotics-summit-expo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2026\/06\/11\/bu-robotics-club-wins-first-prize-and-audience-choice-award-at-annual-robotics-summit-expo\/","title":{"rendered":"BU Robotics Club Wins First Prize and Audience Choice Award at Annual Robotics Summit & Expo"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Mia Knezevic<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The challenge: find a problem in the world and solve it using a robot whose form is informed by its function. The BU Robotics Club\u2019s answer: AgroBot, an autonomous tomato-picking robot.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"At this spring’s\u00a0<\/span>Robotics Summit & Expo<\/span><\/a>\u2014an annual event that brings together more than 5,000 developers focused on building robots for aerospace and defense, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and other markets\u2014the BU Robotics Club brought home both the First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the 4th Form & Function Robotics Challenge. The First Prize Award came with $10,000 in seed money, and the Audience Choice Award came with an additional $1,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was the BU Robotics Club\u2019s first time ever entering the competition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The team developed the concept for AgroBot, a tomato-picking robot. \u201cTomatoes seem silly, but they are sort of perfectly set up to be addressed with robotics,\u201d says club vice president Dakota Winslow.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Winslow, tomatoes are resistant to traditional mechanical harvesting techniques. Tomatoes will be smashed if you shake a bush and wait for the tomatoes to fall off, and running over a tomato bush with a combine harvester will shred them. Thus, tomatoes must be plucked from their vines delicately and carefully, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to use a robotic arm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read the full story on the website of the <\/strong>BU Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE)<\/a>.<\/strong><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The students designed and built a robotic solution for tomato harvesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":174907,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,907,908,1350,1000],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174905"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174905"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174911,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174905\/revisions\/174911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}