Maaratech newsletter – Issue 2 – December 2020
After a very unusual year, the whole team have been very busy ensuring that our work can still go ahead as planned. Read all about it in December’s newsletter...
New Dexterity wins international prize at Hackaday
The New Dexterity Group won the Assistive Devices open challenge of the 2020 Hackaday Prize with their wearable, soft robotic exoskeleton gloves! The Hackaday Prize is an international competition organized by SupplyFrame and sponsored by many organizations,...
Robotics to help with fruit picker shortage
Professor Bruce MacDonald talks to RNZ around improved technologies to help solve the seasonal worker shortage in NZ’s horticultural sector. Listen to the episode of RNZ podcast: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/podcast-card/fruit-picking-squeeze...
EurAgEng Outstanding Paper Award 2020 – short listed paper
Congratulations to our Multipurpose Orchard Robotics Team! Our recent paper: Robotic kiwifruit harvesting using machine vision, convolutional neural networks, and robotic arms, (submitted to Biosystems Engineering) has been shortlisted for consideration for a EurAgEng...
Enginuity Day 2020 – inspiring our future women engineers!
Enginuity Day, an annual event hosted by the Faculty of Engineering celebrates, motivates, and inspires our future women engineers. Girls from high school were invited to hear about, learn, and try engineering activities. Our robotics team led by Henry Williams, Jamie...
A fruitful partnership with Robotics Plus
Over the last 6+ years, CARES has partnered with Robotics Plus to develop robotics technologies for orchards. Our collaboration on project Multipurpose Orchard Robotics, developed new orchard automation technology for pollination and harvesting services...
Meet a roboticist: Mahla Nejati, PhD student
Meet Mahla Nejati, PhD student. “My most memorable moment: seeing the robot pick a kiwifruit for the first time” Multipurpose Orchard Robotics was an awesome project that developed new orchard automation technology for pollination and harvesting of fruit such as...
Our NZ Kiwifruit picking robot features on BBC
Our very own Robot – The Autonomous Mobile Multipurpose Platform (AMMP) robot from MBIE funded project: Multipurpose Orchard Robotics was featured in an article as part of BBC’s Follow the Food series. This series investigating how agriculture is responding to...
Meet a roboticist: Parag Tarwadi, PhD student
Meet Parag Tarwadi, PhD student How would you describe your project? My research is to develop a reliable, real-time, and inexpensive navigation system for scanning a ship hull with the unwanted biofouling. The underwater robot will autonomously navigate around the...
MaaraTech: authentic robotics co-design
MaaraTech is not just a robotics engineering project. Marama Muru-Lanning and Tia Dawes (James Henare Māori Research Centre) lead our Social Science research objectives, paving the way for greater engagement with Māori growers and workers. The social science aspects...