# L5 Update 24.01: Happy New Year! USDA Win, WeFunder Campaign Featured, Foliage Work, Astrobotic Launch, Peru | L5 Automation

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/169835
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:169835
- Published at: 2024-01-07 19:02:42 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-09 03:24:21 UTC

## Author
Alexander Gutierrez

## Subject
L5 Automation

## Content
HighlightsOfficially recommended for Funding for USDA Phase I grant!WeFunder Campaign featured on WeFunder and listed in latest newsletterContinued Technical Progress on Foliage ManipulationAstrobotic Launch - Now scheduled for MONDAY, January 8 at 2:18AM ESTPeru Testing - No details, but things are going wellSwarthmore Students - Delivered 'E-Box'Bernardo completes his PhD, resumes full time MondayNext StepsUpcoming Events: World Ag Expo Feb 13-15thIt has been an incredible end of year and start to the new year here at L5. We have not been idle, and have racked up some important wins. Most notably, while not officially public, we have been recommended for funding by our reviewer at the USDA for planned work on “Automated In-field Assessment of Strawberry Characteristics for Mechanized Harvesting”. We are thrilled to having advanced to this stage :). Beyond USDA, our WeFunder campaign has now been featured on the home page of WeFunder and was part of the most recent Newsletter that went out, we are thrilled for the attention it is getting =). Next, we continue the good work in Peru, and are looking forward to next steps. Finally, last but not least, Bernardo is going to be re-joining us Full Time starting Monday. We are thrilled to have him back officially!USDA Phase I grantWe have been recommended for award for our work on "Automated In-field Assessment of Strawberry Characteristics for Mechanized Harvesting”. In this proposal, we will be paid to improve technologies to characterize and classify strawberries for use in Mechanized Harvesting. This is a very nice and complementary proposal to our work with the NSF which was about foliage manipulation and visibility. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have reached this stage!WeFunder CampaignWe have been featured in the 'explore' are of WeFunder as "New this week" :), including being put in the newsletter they send out every week. The newsletter name was "Strawberry harvesting robots, Spanish soccer teams, and best friend chatbots". It is very excited to be highlighted in this way :). As always, feel free to check out our campaign here: https://wefunder.com/l5automationContinued Technical Progress on Foliage ManipulationWe have continued our technical work on Foliage Manipulation, increasing our ability to do additional areas, not just the basics. What you see in the image above is the output of our algorithms, identifying the possible push vectors we want to perform for this particular image (taken from a set of other images/other data). While I won't go too much deeper here, we are excited by the progress the team is making!Astrobotic Launch16 years in the making... but Astrobotic is ON THE PAD, with an expected launch tomorrow night/Monday very early AM at 2:18AM EST. Alex is super psyched to see where the company has come from where Red, him and others started from when we co-founded it so very long ago. The expected mission is to land near the Sea of Storms, with tons of interesting payloads. Planned landing on the Moon is February 23, 2024. You can register to watch the landing here. If you happen to be in Florida during the launch window (8th-11th), you can sign up to join the Carnegie Mellon Team here.Final note on this, it is somewhat appropriate that Gene Roddenbury's ashes are on this mission. As I have mentioned to many of you, I have been more and more clear that the goal and vision that we need to achieve is what Star Trek espoused: A world where basic needs like food, shelter and security are had by all. It is only by radically increasing productivity we will get there, and this more than any other reason is our "why" for making L5 happen.Peru TestingWe have continued good work in Peru, bringing on both Pedro and Facundo to the L5 family :). Pedro has extensive experience in operations, and Facundo has just graduated secondary school and is making plans for college. They have been tremendous in their support of L5, and I am looking forward to them continuing to help us make great progress in Peru as we continue to find ways to help out our clients there ;).New E-Box - Swarthmore ProjectWe were fortunate to have a couple of Swarthmore students use our company as a project for this last semester. Eva and Jett worked hard to create an 'e-box' that can enclose a standard server, which we are planning to use this coming season. While it still needs to prove itself in the field with testing, we are excited to have them be a part of our journey!Bernardo rejoins L5We are thrilled that Bernardo has completed his PhD, and will be rejoining us (as planned) this coming Monday. Bernardo, welcome back! You can read his dissertation here: Motion Planning in Artificial and Natural Vector Fields. As you can tell, this is non-strawberry work, but invaluable for the skills it has given him to be used for Strawberries :).Next StepsNext week, the team will be meeting and planning out our work for 2024. In it we plan to detail out *exactly* how we achieve our goals, and where the risks/opportunities are that we may want to exploit. Most importantly, we want to show how we get to 'picking clean' this coming season.EventsFebruary 13-15th we will be at the World Ag Expo in Tulare. If you happen to be there, look for us at the Farm-Ng booths. We will be demonstrating our system live there.Thats it for now, looking onwards and upwards!-AlexCEO & FounderL5 Automation Inc