Intelligent Automation Systems for Field, Factory, & Healthcare

The Guelph Intelligent Greenhouse Automation System (GIGAS) is an intelligent robotic platform engineered for high-wire greenhouse tomato harvesting. Evaluates pedicel-targeting hold-and-cut mechanisms (P1, P2, S1, S2) alongside multi-modal tomato-targeting soft grippers (SG1, SG2) to overcome cluster occlusions and delicate fruit handling. The flagship SG2 end effector combines pneumatic four-bar linkage fingers (38.8 mm to 104 mm span), a double-bevel vacuum suction cup (7.8 N/cm² suction), and closed-loop force-torque sensing to locate and detach mature beefsteak tomatoes at the natural pedicel abscission zone. Demonstrated 100% positioning success and an 81% overall harvesting success rate across commercial greenhouse trials at AMCO Farms (Leamington, ON) and Singh Greenhouses (Millgrove, ON) without produce bruising or calyx damage.

An industrial automated vision inspection station designed for 100% inline quality control of automotive pinions and gears. Solves high-throughput manufacturing cycle time constraints by optimizing stepper actuator kinematics, high-speed camera exposure triggers, and a multi-threaded asynchronous control server architecture. Reduced scan and inference cycle time from 90 seconds to 7.5 seconds per pinion while validating defect detection on 537 scanned gears in production environments.

A hands-free, vision-guided assistive feeding platform designed for individuals with severe upper-limb motor impairments. Integrates a YOLOv9-Seg network for food item and modular tray instance segmentation, MediaPipe Face Mesh tracking for intuitive head-gesture navigation, and a mouth-open dwell-free confirmation trigger. Evaluated in user trials with 22 participants, demonstrating 84.7% head-tracking accuracy, 92.6% graph traversability, and a 9.69/10 safety rating on commodity CPU hardware.

An immersive Virtual Mirror Therapy (VMT) neurorehabilitation system designed to treat upper-extremity hemiplegia following stroke and acquired brain injury (ABI). Replaces conventional physical mirrors with an Oculus Rift CV1 VR headset, Leap Motion optical hand/finger tracking, and Microsoft Kinect v2 skeletal tracking to create an interactive virtual environment that projects real-time mirrored bilateral movements of the unimpaired limb onto the hemiplegic limb avatar. Clinically evaluated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 7 inpatients at the Hamilton Health Sciences Regional Rehabilitation Centre across five functional rehabilitation activities, demonstrating significantly higher patient engagement (16.7 vs 6.0 on RTES) and increased therapy repetition rates compared to traditional mirror therapy.