School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering Seminar Series Presents “Advance Robotics Sensing, Control and Computing for Smart Agriculture” by Dr. Johnny Li

About the event

Presenter: Dr. Johnny Li, Assistant Professor, UI

Abstract

Sustainable production systems (such as smart agriculture and infrastructural management) are facing tremendous challenges in their productivity, efficiency, and resilience due to world-wide growing populations, global supply chain crisis, changing climate, and the severe shortfall of resources and labor forces. Timely identifying and quantifying spatial and temporal variabilities in complex production systems and processes has been a crucial factor for improving production and resource management efficiency. Innovative robotics sensing, control theory, and machine learning are needed to collect mission-critical data at relevant time and space scales, minimize systematic errors in measurement, to understand the production systems and their interaction with environment, enable more effective control of resource inputs, and improve the efficiency of production. In this presentation, Dr. Li will integrate advanced robotics platform and multimodal sensing and control system development, deep machine learning and high-performance computing at edge/cloud for domain-specific applications, including precision agriculture automation, infrastructural inspection. Dr. Li will conclude his presentation by envisioning how his research experience in advanced agricultural research, sensing and modeling, artificial intelligence and computational science will empower smart agriculture and their management decision making.

Biography

Johnny (Liujun) Li is Assistant Professor in Department of Soil and Water Systems at College of Agricultural and Life Science, Department of Mechanical Engineering at College of Engineering at the University of Idaho. He is founding director of Precision Agriculture and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (PAIR) Laboratory with focus on advance next generation robotics sensing, control and computing for smart agriculture and environmental management. He received the B. Eng. degree in Agricultural Mechanization from Hunan Agricultural University, Hunan, China, in 2002, and a MSc. degree in Materials Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Mechatronics Engineering both from Central South University, China, in 2005 and 2012. Before moving to Moscow-Pullman, he was an associate research professor in Civil Engineering and Center for Intelligent Infrastructure (CII) at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, Missouri after his postdoc research at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at The University of Georgia and Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He published more than 40 papers on journals and referred conference. His research interest is advanced robotics sensing and control, machine learning and interfacing with real-time close-loop feedback control and decision making for agricultural and industrial domain-specific applications.