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Girls of Steel Robotics : Director

Towards Autonomous Crop Monitoring: Inserting Sensors in Cluttered Environments

Cyber-agricultural systems for crop breeding and sustainable production

Mapping of Potential Fuel Regions Using Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles for Wildfire Prevention

A Robust Illumination-Invariant Camera System for Agricultural Applications

Stereo Visual Inertial LiDAR Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

George Kantor is a Senior Systems Scientist in the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. He has been developing robotic technologies to address problems in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and scientific exploration for 15 years. He is also the head mentor of the Girls of Steel Robotics Team, FIRST FRC Team 3504.

The control of dynamical systems becomes increasingly important as the era of robotics research dominated by quasi-static machines rapidly comes to a close. Similarly, the importance of state estimation grows as robotic applications require robots to function in larger, more complex environments. George's research addresses both of these issues by focusing on the dual problems of controlling robotic mechanisms with non-trivial dynamics and perceiving the state of world through indirect measurements. His approach is both analytical and experimental: George uses mathematics to understand the physical behavior of a given system and then use that understanding to create algorithms for control or estimation. George strives to develop new theoretical concepts and translate them into real-world implementations that solve problems such as balancing an unstable robot or estimating the location of an autonomous vehicle.

Underwater Robotics

Robotics in Agriculture and Forestry

Field & Service Robotics

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)

Mining Robotics

CMU The Robotics Institute Profile

Kantor Lab Website

Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence Robohub Profile

ResearchGate Citations

IEEE Xplore Citations

Google Scholar Citations

Pittsburgh-Based AI Startup Bloomfield Robotics is Acquired by Kubota Corporation, a Global Tractor Manufacturer

Why CMU’s School of Computer Science (finally) launched a bachelor of science in robotics

CMU Puts AI To Work in New NSF-funded Institutes

Seeing a future for crop estimation technology

Pittsburgh's Girls of Steel Robotics Team Advances to Championship

Balancing robot may care for disabled, elderly

Research Professor / Associate Director of Education

What does it take to teach a robot to pick an apple? Let’s find out.  In today’s episode, we will explore how AI technologies are helping agriculture solve some of the world’s biggest problems – from world hunger to protecting the environment to a labor shortage down on the farm.  








Robots, drones and machine learning are being used by farmers around the world to monitor crop health, soil conditions and weather patterns -- so they can optimize the yield from their crops while conserving scarce resources such as water.  AI is protecting the environment when robots identify weeds and then eliminate them one at a time – a precision that dramatically reduces broader usage of potentially harmful chemicals and herbicides.  AI-powered self-driving tractors and robots are performing tasks such as watering, spraying and harvesting crops  to help farmers grow food from fields that might otherwise go untended due to a worldwide labor shortage.  Drones equipped with high-resolution cameras are monitoring crops for real-time signs of disease and pest infestations, thereby securing the safety of food for generations to come.  Across the USA and around the planet, AI is quickly becoming the newest tool in the farmer’s toolshed.  








Joining us are four experts in AI and agriculture: George Kantor is a research professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  Pat Schnable is a distinguished professor at Iowa State University, director of its Plant Sciences Instituten and a co-founder of an ag-tech startup EnGeniusAg.  Abhi Silwal is a Senior Project Scientist at CMU’s Robotics Institute. Terry Bates is the Director of the Cornell Lake Erie Research and Extension Lab, a Senior Research Associate at Cornell’s School of Integrated Plant Sciences and the director of the Efficient Vineyard Project.

AI and Agriculture: How to Pick an Apple

Dramatic increases in food production are urgently needed to keep pace with 21st century population growth.  Our collective vision is to develop perennial grain and legume crops, providing a radically new approach with the potential to leapfrog chronic problems faced by food systems in the developing world. Perennials will be more affordable and accessible, suited to marginal soils, require less water and fertilizers, and be more resilient in the face of sociopolitical disruptions. We will accelerate perennial breeding by integrating genetics, robotics, and information technologies to make faster and more precise assessments of plant development. Seed developed in this project will be open source; the genetic material and seed production methods will be freely distributed. Working with breeders, communities, and policy makers in African countries, we will create and disseminate these new crops and develop sustainable production and distribution methods, with the ultimate goal of creating a global agricultural system that can support a growing world.

For more, visit: http://cmu.edu/perennial-crops

Video submission for the MacArthur Foundation 100&Change competition.

Feeding a Growing World

Many growers hesitate to buy technology or hire services from unproven startups. That’s understandable, but the nascent company trying to commercialize a new tool marks one of the most critical stages in the development of ag technology. 

“Startups are a good way to take technology from a university to you,” said George Kantor, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. He spoke about emerging technology for the tree fruit industry at the 2019 Washington State Tree Fruit Association’s Annual Meeting in December and encouraged growers to support new tools. (TJ Mullinax, Kate Prengaman/Good Fruit Grower)

The state of orchard robotics with George Kantor

Learn more here:
https://labs.ri.cmu.edu/aiira/

AIIRA Sept 2022 Report : Carnegie Mellon University

George Kantor is a Systems Scientist at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University,  His research interests are in the areas of sensor networks and robotics, with a special emphasis on control and estimation. He as been developing and applying sensor network technology for specialty agriculture for ten years, during which time he has focused on problems such as disease prediction, closed-loop irrigation, and nutrient management.  He has also developed mobile robot platforms for applications in mining, scientific exploration, and agriculture, including autonomous navigation in apple orchards.

CIVF2012 11: George Kantor

Dr. Dan Cooley and Paul O'Connor, UMass Amherst Stockbridge School of Agriculture and Abhisesh Silwal, Project Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University describe the methods and logistics of using robotics and imaging to increase efficiency of orchard and vineyard management strategies.

Project participants: Abhisesh Silwal, Project Scientist, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburg. Mohamed Qadri, MSR Student. George Kantor, Senior Systems Scientist, Field Robotics Center, CMU. Zack Rubinstein, Principal Project Scientist, Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory, CMU. Jon Clements and Dan Cooley, UMass Extension Fruit Team and UMass Amherst Stockbridge School of Agriculture.

May 19 Twilight Part 1- Robotics with Carnegie Mellon University

George Kantor is a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. He has over 20 years of experience in developing and deploying robotic technologies for real-world applications in military, agriculture, mining, and scientific exploration. His technical interests lie in position estimation and mapping for mobile robots, control of robotic systems with nontrivial dynamics, off-road autonomous driving, and deep learning for image analysis and sensor fusion “on the edge”. In the agriculture domain, his group has developed mobile robots for in-field phenotyping, perception pipelines for creating dense 3D plant models, and reinforcement learning approaches for robotic manipulation in tree canopies.

Abstract
Much as been said about the potential for AI and robotics technologies to help advance agricultural production and breeding systems. This talk will focus on what it takes to enable robots to perform delicate dextrous manipulation tasks that have so far resisted automation. It will review perception work to date, which can be used to provide robots with detailed geometric and semantic understandings of their surroundings, though some challenges remain in the agricultural space. It will then propose methods of using that understanding to drive intelligent interactions with plants that will enable tasks such as harvesting or pruning in dense tree canopies.

The ICICLE project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant number OAC-2112606. Learn more at https://icicle.osu.edu/ 

Filmed March 9, 2023

ICICLE Seminar Series - Robotics for Agriculture: Moving from Perception to Action

http://www.msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ballbot/

Features Ralph Hollis, George Kantor, Umashankar Nagarajan and Michael Shomin explaining how Ballbot might be able to help people and why it stands out as a better alternative to robots with heavy, bulky multi-wheeled bases.

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