Symbiotic Computing Deployments
Symbiotic evaluation will build upon and extend three systems that our team has taken out of
the lab and deployed in the wild: homes, commercial orchards, and public roads.
Care: mealtime assistance in the home
FEAST lets care recipients personalize the robot themselves. We built it over three years of
participatory design with Aimee, who has multiple sclerosis, and Benjamin, who has a spinal cord
injury, then ran it in their own homes with minimal researcher intervention. A formative study
with 21 care recipients surfaced 46 distinct personalization needs: bite size, approach angle,
when to ask rather than act. The lesson was that deployment success turns not on more autonomy,
but on whether the user can re-parameterize the robot without researcher intervention.
Two private homes · Three-year co-design
Agriculture: apple harvesting in commercial orchards
Fifteen years of machine-vision systems, end-effectors, and integrated harvesting robots,
rigid and soft, tested in university and commercial orchards in New York and Washington across
a wide range of cultivars and canopy architectures. The field located the boundary. Robots pick
accessible fruit very effectively; fruit in clusters, or occluded by branches and foliage,
remains the open problem. Commercial deployability runs through multi-arm coordination and
human–robot collaboration on canopy perception, planning, and manipulation.
NY & WA orchards · Fifteen years of field studies
Mobility: all-weather perception on public roads
An instrumented vehicle drove the same 15 km route through Ithaca hundreds of times over
fifteen months, through sun, rain, snow, night, and traffic, capturing high-density lidar,
camera, and GPS/inertial data with amodal annotations for partially occluded objects. Repetition
was the instrument: one route driven hundreds of times turns weather, light, and season into
controlled variables, which no single-pass collection can do. Released as the Ithaca365 dataset
(ithaca365.mae.cornell.edu, CVPR 2022), it
remains in community use for perception in low light and adverse weather. The rig has since
collected in Hanoi.
Ithaca, NY & Hanoi · Fifteen-month longitudinal collection
