Yu She
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Robots work well with rigid objects but struggle where gentle sensing and careful handling are needed, whether in an orchard or in an operating room. The projects here build robots that sense their surroundings in detail and act precisely.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
robotics
precision agriculture
drones
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Detect early signs of apple scab, fire blight and powdery mildew in apple orchards using drones carrying multispectral and thermal cameras.
- Develop a learning-based model predictive control (MPC) framework that lets ground robots adjust site-specific pesticide spraying in real time from sensor data, environmental conditions and disease severity.
- Build a cloud-based IoT platform that combines drone and ground-robot data into grower dashboards, and validate the full system in orchards across several regions.
- Design fatigue-resistant photoelastic gels and an optical system that reads stress from their color fringe patterns, giving robot grippers touch sensitive to very small forces.
- Apply physics-informed machine learning to interpret gel-robot contacts, and demonstrate gentle handling of fragile objects such as jellyfish and custards.
More about the research
One uses drones and ground robots to find and treat disease in apple orchards. The other gives robot grippers a color-changing gel 'skin' so they can feel and handle fragile objects without damaging them.
Why it matters
Targeted disease detection and spraying could help apple growers cut pesticide use, labor and costs while protecting yields from scab, fire blight and powdery mildew. Gel-based touch sensing could let robots handle soft, fragile objects without damage. This could benefit surgical and medical robotics, assistive devices for daily tasks, and the collection of delicate marine specimens.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cagdas Onal
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA·Engineering
Develop a modular, origami-inspired continuum robot arm (CoBRA) with customizable design algorithms, so the arm can be tailored to specific assistive tasks in homes and healthcare settings.
Qi Lu
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, TX·Computer Science
Develop a decentralized algorithm that plans multiple shortest routes at once, so that UAVs (aerial drones) can explore promising locations on demand, collecting data quickly while saving energy for the ground robots in the swarm.
Bruno Sinopoli
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering
Establish closed-loop stability guarantees for REAP solvers, optimization methods that return a safe, feasible answer even when stopped early, and develop ways to implement them on discrete-time digital hardware.
The school
Purdue University: 43 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 833 research doctorates a year.
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