Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 2 Summer 2019 | Page 16

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they used to win the watermelon harvesting challenge at agBOT in 2018
with obstacle avoidance technology and created a towed vehicle that was a
self-contained laboratory.
“We went through several iterations of what we thought would work
before putting this vehicle together,” said Guo. “We also consulted with
Professor Jonathan Eisenback (plant pathology, physiology, and weed
science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences) who has a semi-auto-
mated machine that tracks nematodes from the soil. We used that theory
when designing and building our trailer, but we had to make our vehicle
much smaller.”
After collecting a soil sample, a back-washing system is used to extract
the soil from the drill and deposits it into a canister where it is run
through a filtration process. A robot arm collects a mesh tube and collects
the filtered solution and deposits the tube into a custom-made centrifuge