Two undergraduate projects from the University of Arkansas received first-place awards at the 2026 ASABE Annual International Meeting in Indianapolis. The meeting ran from 12–15 July, bringing agricultural and biological engineering research into a common technical forum.
The university’s 31 July report describes an automated strawberry stem-and-leaf removal system developed for smaller processors. The student team combined computer vision, motion control and industrial safety systems in a sponsored prototype, winning the AGCO National Student Design Competition.
A separate K.K. Barnes Student Paper Competition award recognized research on beef marbling assessment across processing facilities using unsupervised domain adaptation. Both projects address deployment problems: equipment affordability and models that must work beyond their original training setting. The awards recognize research and design work, not proof of a commercially validated product.
