PHOTO: PETER VISSER
PHOTO: OCTINION
ROBOT HARVESTING ▶▶▶
Octinion director Tom Coen: “The only thing that matters are the costs per strawberry picked. And our robot is competitive to human pickers on that aspect.”
not) and the size. These images are processed in real-time and not based on earlier detec- tions. The gripper is 3D-printed and soft to prevent damage to the fruits and pulls the strawberry down in combination with an an- gled movement. The gripper is designed to equally divide its pressure over the fruit sur- face. Octinion is also working on a robot that can predict yield volumes.
Sweet peppers Two months ago, the European Sweeper har- vesting robot demonstrated during a demo
that it is now capable of harvesting sweet pep- pers. Sweeper is jointly developed by the Ben-Gurion University (Israel), Research Sta- tion for Vegetable Production (Belgium), Bo- gaerts Greenhouse Logistics (Belgium), Umea Uni versity (Sweden), and Wageningen Univer- sity & Research and sweet pepper grower De Tuindershoek (both Dutch). Cameras within the robot’s head accompanied by powerful led lights determine the position of the fruits and scan the peppers from multi- ple directions to recognise ripe fruits. The head then cuts the fruit after which it is caught by a
six-legged sort of hand that consequently drops the fruit in a tray or box. The robot is de- signed to operate in a single stem row crop- ping system, with non-clustered fruits and lit- tle leaf occlusion. Preliminary test results showed that by using a commercially available crop modified to mimic the required condi- tions, the robot currently takes 24 seconds to harvest one fruit compared to a harvest work- er’s 3 seconds (on average), indicating how superior the human brain works in observa- tion and coordination. However, robot perfor- mance has already improved compared to four years ago, when it took 92 seconds. Charging the battery of the robot takes four hours and it can then work for another 20 hours. The Sweeper consortium expects that a commercial sweet pepper harvesting robot will be available within four to five years, and that the technology could be adapted for har- vesting other crops. The costs are anticipated to be between € 60,000 and € 100,000.
Raspberries The upcoming Brexit (the UK leaving the Eu- ropean Union) seems to have stimulated Brit- ish companies to develop harvesting robots, as sufficient (cheap) labour may not be availa- ble that easily after Brexit. Robotics company Fieldworks Robotics has started cooperating with one of the largest soft fruit producers in the UK, Hall Hunter. British Plymouth Univer- sity has developed a raspberry picking robot that will be doing its tests at Hall Hunter. Fieldwork Robotics is to commercialise the robot afterwards. It is anticipated that if a robot can harvest the sensitive raspberries, it can harvest any type of fruit and vegetable. Plymouth University is also working on harvesting robots for toma- toes and cauliflower.
Preliminary test results showed that by using a commercially available crop modified to mimic the required conditions, the Sweeper robot currently harvests ripe fruit in 24 seconds with a success rate of 62%.
34 ▶ FUTURE FARMING | 1 November 2018
There’s more Apart from the mentioned products and pro- totypes there’s various other products and projects on autonomous robotic harvesting including apples (Abundant Robotics (US), FFRobotics (Israel)), strawberries (Dogtooth Technologies (UK), Agrobot (US & Spain), Har- vest CROO Robotics (US), Japan), cucumbers (Fraunhofer Institute (Germany), ) and toma- toes (MetoMotion (Israel) Wageningen UR (Netherlands), Crux Agribotics (Netherlands).
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
