🏆 Excellence in Specialty Crops Award – Farm Robotics Challenge 2026
Team Advisor: Dr. Ali Moghimi
Students: Krishna Aggarwal, Negar Agah, Mohammadreza Narimani, Inseon Kim
UC Davis Biological and Agricultural Engineering
The Achievement
I am immensely proud to share that our Aggie Aerial-Ground Robotics team from UC Davis won the prestigious Excellence in Specialty Crops Award (Division I), presented by Western Growers, at the Farm Robotics Challenge 2026. Held at the USA Plug and Play Summit, this global challenge brought together 96 teams from around the world to present AI-based solutions that modernize agriculture.
Our team is dedicated to bringing mechanization, robotics, and artificial intelligence to agriculture. We strongly believe that these technologies can fill critical gaps in the industry, support growers, and pave the way for more efficient and sustainable food production on a global level.
Honored to receive the Excellence in Specialty Crops Award at the USA Plug and Play Summit.
Project BloomSense: Our Award-Winning Solution
For the challenge, we developed BloomSense, an advanced robotic system tailored for almond bloom management. It combines orchard-scale UAV mapping with multi-angle in-canopy imagery captured by a farm-ng Amiga ground robot. We created a close-loop robotic workflow to not only measure bloom density but also direct an autonomous applicator.
- Aerial Layer (UAV): Captures whole-block structure and spatial bloom distribution.
- Ground Layer (Amiga Robot): Drives the rows to gather close-range inside-canopy imagery where aerial vision is limited. Additionally, it carries a mobile bee-activity sensor (FarmSense FlightSensor) to log temporal and spatial pollinator activity.
- Multi-Agent AI Framework (3D Gaussian Splatting): Generates a detailed 3D reconstruction of trees and computes tree-level bloom density computationally, mapping true positive blooms with high precision.
- Targeted Intervention (APIS BLOOM): Combines bloom intensity and pollinator layers to calculate "pollination gap scores." The Amiga ground robot then autonomously navigates and dispenses APIS BLOOMpheromones exclusively in areas where bloom potential is high, but bee visitation is functionally low.
Watch Project BloomSense in Action
Our official competition entry effectively outlines our approach with the Amiga robot platform and UAV fusion techniques.
Video source cited from Farm Robotics Challenge 2026 Winners
Acknowledgements & Media Coverage
A very special thank you to our advisor, Dr. Ali Moghimi, for his guidance, support, and dedication. He was not only supervising us but also spending long hours alongside us in the lab and in the field, always motivating us to move forward.
Special thanks to the University of California, Davis, the UC Davis Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department, and Dr. Fadi Fathallah for their support and encouragement throughout this journey.
Finally, thank you to the organizers at UCANR Innovate and the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS) for this amazing opportunity to be 'boots on the ground' for agriculture. We also extend our huge thanks to industry partners: Plug and Play, RESERVOIR, Western Growers, and Bonsai Robotics.
Aggie Aerial-Ground Robotics Team posing by the Amiga robot.
Read the Official Coverage
Proud to be an Aggie and excited to keep working toward the future of agriculture.
Go Aggies! 💙💛