Introduction to OSIRIS, the Onboard Soil In-situ Robot-assisted Intelligent System
2026 ASABE Annual International Meeting, Indianapolis, July 2026. Meeting presentation, published by ASABE.
Autonomous soil sampling equipment for research.
Excelsior Applied Systems is an engineering company in Troy, New York. Our first system, OSIRIS, is designed to collect soil cores from an unmanned ground vehicle, store each core onboard, and link every sample to its location, depth, and time, for agricultural and environmental research.
What we do
Sampling equipment
We design ground robots that collect physical soil cores at a specified depth, index each core onboard, and record the location, depth, and time of every sample.
Research partnerships
Development is carried out with a university robotics laboratory, with Excelsior Applied Systems as the small business partner in federal research programs.
Field evaluation
Research stations, laboratories, and sampling programs are invited to host field trials, planned for 2027, and to evaluate the system.
OSIRIS
An integrated platform for autonomous soil sampling. It is designed to automate vehicle positioning, soil coring, core exchange, onboard storage, and sample indexing, with coring control that adapts to changing soil conditions. The core handling subsystem has been bench tested, the coring control is in simulation, and field trials are planned for 2027.
Core handling cycle, bench average2 min 9 s
Positional error, benchUnder 0.5 mm
Onboard capacity, bench prototype10 cores
Design target, full scaleUp to 30 per run
Publications
Conference papers on the platform and its initial results.
An autonomous robot-assisted system for high-resolution in-situ soil sampling in agricultural fields
ASME 2026 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, Vancouver, November 2026. Accepted, in press.
Inquiries
Inquiries are welcome from research stations, laboratories, sampling programs, and program officers.
Write to info@excelsiorapplied.com with your organization, the material you sample, the sampling depth, and the record each sample requires. Replies are sent within two business days.