UC Merced Connect: Solution engineered for sweet potato farm

A group of students in the most recent School of Engineering capstone design course at UC Merced devised a sweet solution to a local farm’s harvesting problem, one that is reaping long-term benefits for the farm and the students.

D&S Farms, a multigeneration family farm that grows and packs sweet potatoes in Atwater, has harvesting machines that pull trailers to haul the freshly picked tubers.

But its steering is hard to control even when manually guided,so sweet potatoes – and profits – can be crushed as the trailers wander behind the harvesters.

Frustrated with the ongoing inefficiency, D&S manager Brian Carter approached professor Ashlie Martini last spring to see if her capstone students could provide an answer.

Her six-member team, comprising five mechanical engineering students and a computer science and engineering student, traveled to the Atwater farm to get a better look at the challenge.

The solution was both mechanical and computational. The team developed Sweet Steering, a sensor-driven mechanism that fits over the trailer hitch and monitors the angles in the hitch’s rotation, then tells the hydraulics how to move as the harvester pulls the trailer along the dirt rows in the potato fields.

The mechanism measures the change in angle to within 1 degree and guides the trailer far more precisely than a human can, Carter said. The team figures the devices will save D&S between $45,000 and $60,000 a year in potato waste and extra labor once all the devices are installed.

In the spring, Sweet Steering won UC Merced’s Innovate to Grow competition, providing the team with $5,000 and free assistance from a patent attorney.

The team developed a business plan that won them the grand prize at an entrepreneurial workshop at UC Davis this summer, and four of the original team members are working with D&S to outfit all 12 of the farm’s harvesters with the mechanism.

“We tried several different ideas, but finally settled on this one, and built and tested it in a semester,” said team member Sean Lantz, who graduated in May and is pursuing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Martini credited part of the team’s success to Carter and D&S co-owner David Souza for working so closely with the students.

“It makes a big, big difference to have them actively involved in the project,” Martini said. “The students really step up when they see that someone from the ‘real world’ is expecting them to be accountable and work on the project as professional engineers.

“They designed something that works well and that people can really use.”

Hispanic Honor Society

Spanish majors and minors at UC Merced have a new measure of excellence to pursue, thanks to the recent charter of the university’s chapter of Sigma Delta Pi. UC Merced is the seventh UC campus to charter a chapter of the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society, which was founded at UC Berkeley in 1919.

Sigma Delta Pi is a registered campus organization, which means it has officers and its own operational budget. Founding members – four students and two faculty members – were inducted in November. Armando Lomeli is the group’s founding president. Other officers are Tim Alexander, Sonia Ortiz and Sonia Roman.

“The purpose of the society isn’t just to promote Spanish language and culture,” adviser Elinor Torda said, “but also to encourage students to strive to meet a standard of excellence.”

To qualify for membership, students must show academic and personal excellence, including a minimum overall grade-point average of 3.0, a 3.0 GPA in all Spanish courses and demonstrate genuine interest in all things Hispanic.

This story was originally published December 30, 2014 at 4:46 PM with the headline "UC Merced Connect: Solution engineered for sweet potato farm."