Care: Mealtime assistance
Our deployment, named FEAST, enables care recipients to personalize the robot themselves.
FEAST was built over three years of participatory design with Aimee, who has multiple sclerosis,
and Benjamin, who has a spinal cord injury. We then deployed FEAST in their homes for five days a
year with minimal researcher intervention. A formative study with 21 care recipients surfaced 46
distinct personalization needs; an important learning was that deployment success depends not on
more autonomy, but on the user’s ability to re-parameterize the robot without researcher
intervention.
Symbiotic control · Two private homes · Three-year co-design, five-day in-home study
Agriculture: Robotic apple harvesting
Fifteen years of machine-vision systems, end-effectors, and integrated robots for apple
harvesting—both rigid and soft manipulators—tested in university experimental orchards
and commercial orchards in New York and Washington, across a broad range of cultivars and canopy
architectures, and progressively improved. The field studies show robots pick accessible fruit
very effectively; fruit growing in clusters, or occluded by other fruit, branches, or foliage,
remains the challenge. The path to commercial deployability runs through multi-arm collaboration
and human–robot collaboration on canopy perception, decision making, path planning, and
manipulation.
Symbiotic perception · NY & WA orchards · Fifteen years of field studies
Trust and safety: Perception in all weather
Over fifteen months, an instrumented vehicle drove the same 15km route through
Ithaca—urban, highway, suburban, and campus—hundreds of times, across sun, rain,
snow, night, and traffic, capturing high-density lidar, camera, and GPS/inertial data with
amodal annotations for partially occluded objects. Published as the Ithaca365 dataset
(ithaca365.mae.cornell.edu, CVPR 2022), it
remains in community use for the problems this initiative cares about: perception in low
light, adverse weather, and learning from repeated traversals. The sensor rig has since
collected in Hanoi.
Symbiotic perception · Ithaca, NY & Hanoi · 15-month longitudinal collection
