"Deepdive in the minor Biomimicry! The Knip 'N Grip 🌿 ❓ What do you do when you want to give vertical farms 'a hand' in automation of harvesting of small greens?
❗ You make a human-hand-inspired robot that can do that for you!
This was the idea of Ilse Nederveen, Martijn Bakker, Veronika Cherkasova and Wouter Bos, one of the groups of last year's Biomimicry minor! Their goal was to create a robot that could gently pick basil from a vertical farm, which would reduce the labor costs and optimize the packaging process.
This group had backgrounds in artificial intelligence, business analytics, biology and information sciences and together they joined forces to create this super cool robot, which actually had two silicone fingers! This project was also guided by Growy and Pien Marck-de Wolff, which we visited in the beginning of the minor. A great demonstration of joining forces between academic education and cool innovative companies," shares the UVA.