Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2018 | Page 20

STORY BY ROSAIRE BUSHEY
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
agBOT watermelon harvester
takes top prize at competition
The Virginia Tech AgBot team clinched first
place in the third annual AgBot Challenge
May 19 at Gerrish Farms in Rockville, Indi-
ana, earning a top award of $30,000.
The 2018 event, hosted by Gerrish Farms
and airBridge LLC, was broken into two
separate challenges – weed and feed, and
harvesting – with university and industry
teams competing head-to-head for $100,000
in prizes.
Virginia Tech’s team won the watermelon
harvesting challenge by creating an auton-
omous system that could identify, sort, and
harvest ripe watermelons in a field. Each team
in the harvesting competition was scored in
mechanics, software, innovativeness of their
solution, and execution of their solution.
To build a harvester and the autonomous
vehicle that pulls it, two separate teams were
formed. A mechanical engineering senior
design team designed and built the harvester
MOMENTUM
SUMMER 2018
and a special studies team responsible for the
autonomous vehicle that towed the harvester.
As team lead, Hongxu “Howard” Guo, a dou-
ble major in mechanical and electrical engi-
neering, worked on both teams, coordinating
the work of the two groups’ 14 people.
“There was a very clear definition and set
of responsibilities each of the teams had, but
they were independent teams,” Guo said. “We
learned a lot from last year and this year we
followed a systematic design process with
Gantt charts and scheduling that allowed us to
stay true to a deadline.”
The increased attention to schedules was an
important shift for this year’s agBOT team,
according to Sena Hunde, a masters student in
mechanical engineering. “Last year our scope
was too wide – we were trying to design an
autonomous vehicle on top of the challenge
vehicle and it wasn’t achievable. With the
senior design team working on the harvester
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