Page 90 - Innovation Delaware 2021

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
TRIC Robotics: Building a Pest-Killing Robot
A DAM STAGER spent many nights last year standing in a chilly strawberry patch at Fifer Orchards outside Dover, watching his weed- and pest-killing robot work.
“I was walking a couple of feet away from the robot, watching the wheel run, stopping it, checking the code, making sure it was doing what it was supposed to do,” says Stager, who has a PhD in robotics from the University of Delaware. “It was a lot of work, but we learned really fast and we fixed a lot of the bugs in the software to the point where now, we are able to just push a button and wait for the robot to finish the treatment.” Stager’s company, TRIC Robotics, is in its second year of testing. They’ve moved from pilot sites in West Virginia and Delaware to organic strawberry farms in California, where
the growing season is perpetual. The goal, Stager explains, is
a “Roomba for the field” that deploys autonomously and does everything at night by itself.
Here’s how it works: Ultraviolet-C, or UVC, is part of the ultraviolet light spectrum. Unlike UVA and UVB—which we block with sunscreen—UVC does not penetrate Earth’s ozone layer. Because UVC doesn’t get through, plants and animals,
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company. What’s great about having people there is they can build a strong relationship with the farmer because they’re more present on the farm, and also we can learn a lot really fast.”
One thing TRIC Robotics learned is that organic farmers make a great starting point for its potential customer base. Organic growers essentially have nothing to address the pests, meaning there’s less business risk for them in switching to the robot. It’s input like this that Stager learned to look for at the University of Delaware, where he participated in the Horn Entrepreneurship program and the Hen Hatch competition. “It’s about getting student ideas off the ground and turned into companies,” Stager says.
At TRIC Robotics, the company is a vehicle for a larger vision. “I think it would be amazing if we could use these sustainable technologies in a way that makes food cheaper
for people,” Stager says. “It’s a big limitation for a lot of low- income people that are constantly trying to put food on the table. I think if we can work toward automating some of the bigger challenges in agriculture, we can eventually reduce the cost of food, and that would be a really good outcome.”
—Matt Ward
ADAM STAGER
including crop-killing fungi
and mites, have not adapted
to protect against it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture figured this out and developed
a light to shine just the right amount of UVC to kill pests
and leave crops healthy. Stager and his team at TRIC Robotics put that light on an autonomous robot. The light, they’ve found, is most effective at night. And so, in the future, Stager hopes the dim blue glow of robots happily crisscrossing strawberry patches will become a normal sight.
“In the future,” Stager explains, “it’ll be completely hands off for the farmer, but today, we have somebody
who sits there and makes sure nothing goes wrong. I think that’s really important in the beginning because we want to build trust with the farmer, and having the robot do something weird like drive diagonally across the field, running over all these strawberry rows, would
be a really bad way to start the