SBIR Phase I: Improving farmer safety and grain storage efficiencies via a remote-controlled grain management and extraction robot

Award ID: 2111555

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to help farmers across the nation improve their grain storage efficiencies in a remote and safe manner. In addition to demonstrating technical feasibility of a mobile robot, this project may help refine key design considerations such as cost, portability, and usability, that will help promote widespread customer adoption during commercialization. Though the robot will be initially designed for commonly stored cereal grains in the U.S., this technology may be applied across numerous agriculture-related commodities around the world. The robotics technology has the potential to enhance farmer safety while simultaneously improving grain management practices that yield more efficient and stable food supply chains. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project explores the use of mobile robots for grain storage assessment. Grain bins provide challenging environments for the operation of robots including: dust and temperature extremes, shifting fluid dynamics, and grain quality challenges. The focus of the research includes classifying and characterizing key grain surface variables that impact robotic effectiveness, identifying the top 3-5 grain management tasks by frequency and importance, and analyzing the impacts of grain characteristics on each task, and designing and conducting controlled environmental studies to quantify performance requirements. The project will also identify and define potential grain engagement paths/patterns for top use case tasks, and analyze potential failure modes for robot operations within grain bins. Once complete, the research may demonstrate the impact on post-harvest workflows, develop autonomous operations, and build a safe robot platform for use in grain bins. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Ela Mirowski