UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Engineering students from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and College of Engineering stood out at the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) annual international conference held recently in Toronto.
Biological engineering major Landis Crawford received the society’s 2025 Student Honor Award in the Engineering Category for her outstanding scholarship and leadership in student activities.
Also, under the leadership of Shirin Ghatrehsamani, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, and Kyusun Choi, teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State’s robotics team placed fourth internationally in the ASABE Robotics Student Design Competition.
That competition allows undergraduate and graduate students to develop skills in robotic systems, electronics and sensing technologies by simulating a fully autonomous robotics solution to a common agricultural process.
In the 2025 competition, teams built autonomous robots that raced to collect and sort as many chicken eggs as possible within five-minute trials. Total score was accumulated from three main tasks — egg identification, navigation and egg handling — and the overall performance. Penn State had one team competing at the beginner level.
Team members included Priyanka Mali, doctoral candidate in agricultural and biological engineering; Joshua Ethan, undergraduate studying cybersecurity analytics and operations; Jungmin Sul, undergraduate majoring in mechanical engineering; Ren Liang Lan, undergraduate student in computer science and engineering; and Evan Yang, undergraduate in computer science and engineering. In addition to finishing fourth overall, the Penn State team took first place in the egg identification task and second place in the navigation task.
Finally, the technical report by Mali was selected as the best student report for the second year in a row. Her written design report was submitted to provide documentation of robot design and functionality. Design reports were judged according to the technical merit criteria including design objectives, hardware description and software description. The reports were reviewed by Robotics Competition Committee members.