BU Robotics Club Wins First Prize and Audience Choice Award at Annual Robotics Summit & Expo

By Mia Knezevic

At this spring’s Robotics Summit & Expo—an annual event that brings together more than 5,000 developers focused on building robots for aerospace and defense, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and other markets—the BU Robotics Club brought home both the First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the 4th Form & Function Robotics Challenge. 

The team developed the concept for AgroBot, a tomato-picking robot. According to club vice president Dakota 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.

The BU Robotics and Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC) played a significant role in the team’s success. Not only did they use the space to develop AgroBot, but it served as the space where the team developed their robotics skills. 

“Nearly everything I’ve learned about [robotics], I and my colleagues learned here in RASTIC,” Winslow said. “Some of the things we learned in our coursework, but most of them we’ve learned just by building and working with robots, the vast majority of which happens in RASTIC.”

The  initial goal of RASTIC was to create a space where this kind of innovation was possible, says Kenneth Sebesta, Director of RASTIC and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE) and Hariri Institute for Computing.

“This never has existed before at any university: where students could build their own robots, but supported by the same industry as the faculty are. They have a space that they can create in and learn hands-on applied robotics, complementing their theoretical skills. This is, in theory, a very powerful combination, and now we have the very visceral confirmation from the world.”

Read the full story on the website of the BU Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE).