Booz Allen Hamilton Colloquium: George Kantor, "AI and Robotics for Crop Management & Breeding"

Friday, September 14, 2018
3:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
1110 Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
Kara Stamets
301 405 4471
stametsk@umd.edu

AI and Robotics for Crop Management & Breeding

George A. Kantor
Senior Systems Scientist
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract
The robotic technologies of mobility, sensing, analysis, and manipulation have the potential to alleviate looming problems with the global food supply. For example, robotic in-field measurements of plants in breeding trials can be used to help plant breeders develop crops that have higher yield and are resistant to drought, disease, and pests. Alternatively, real-time information about crop status can help food producers make decisions during the growing season that allow them to optimize valuable resources such as water, fertilizer, and labor. In this talk, I will present some recent work my group has done to address these problems, including the development of vehicles that can autonomously navigate agricultural environments, and the use of imaging, modeling, and deep learning to measure agricultural parameters in the field. I will also discuss how we have combined the resulting tools for applications to problems such as phenotyping for plant breeding and yield prediction for production. In the conclusion of the talk, I will try to identify some important technical challenges in the agricultural domain going forward.

Biography
George Kantor (EE Ph.D. 1999) is a Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.  He has over 15 years of research experience in developing and deploying robotic technologies for real-world applications such as agriculture, mining, and scientific exploration.  He also is dedicated to K-12 STEM educational outreach activities, including the Girls of Steel Robotics Initiative, which includes an all-girls high school FIRST Robotics Competition team and a continuous pipeline of hands-on robotics educational activities for girls ranging from kindergarten through 12th grade. Kantor holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park.

Audience: Clark School  Graduate  Undergraduate  Faculty  Post-Docs 

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