ROBOT HARVESTERS ▶▶▶ Ready to use
In the catalogue section on the next pages you can find commercially available har- vesting robots. See, for example, the Ceres- con asparagus harvester, FFRobotics apple picker, Harvest CROO Robotics field straw- berry harvesting machine, and the Octinion Rubion indoor strawberry picker.
as they evolve. We foresee that robotic plat- forms for harvest and husbandry activities will play a significant role in increasing product quality, productivity and yields.” Completing initial field trials last year is described by Fieldwork’s Dr Martin Stoelen as a major mile- stone: “That gave us invaluable feedback to keep developing the system towards commercial ization.” Electronics giant Bosch is helping to optimise the harvester’s manipulat- ing arms and control software with the aim of reducing costs and increasing the working speed.
Strawberries There are numerous projects designed to au- tomate strawberry picking. Spanish company Agrobot and the US start-ups Traptic and Ad- vanced Farm Technologies are all developing solutions. The electric drive Agrobot E-Series is a multi-row picker designed to harvest straw- berries grown in both table-top systems and beds. It uses up to 24 independent robotic arms carrying short-range integrated colour and infrared sensors to image the crop so that the ripeness of individual fruit can be as- sessed. The manipulator on each arm grips
Kiwi-fruit picking is relatively easy to robotise as the kiwis hang down from an overhead canopy. This multi-arm device is developed by Robotics Plus in New Zealand.
and snips the stem before moving sideways to place it in a tray. Agrobot CEO Juan Bravo says pre-commercial trials in the United States are planned for 2021. The same goes for the TX self-propelled pick- er, according to Kyle Cobb, co-founder at Ad- vanced Farm Technologies: “We are working with a select group of grower-shippers on ro- botic harvesting in California next year,” he says. This harvester is designed to work on regular outdoor beds, using linear robotic arms, each with a soft gripper designed to “pick red berries to your standard: stem off, calyx on, and ready to eat” before depositing them in trays on the machine. Traptic’s tractor-mounted Ceres harvester has an off-the-shelf multi-link robotic arm with custom software and a metal gripper that
uses rubberised bands with enough flexibility to conform to the different shapes of individu- al berries. “In developing the Ceres, we first had to solve the grasping problem,” says co-founder Lewis Anderson. “The Traptic grip- per grasps strawberries firmly enough to ex- tract them from the plant, yet delicately enough to ensure quality.” A complete ma- chine was field tested in California last year. Traptic plans to offer the machines on a ‘har- vesting as a service’ basis and to develop simi- lar technology for other hand-picked crops. Elsewhere, the UK’s Dogtooth Technologies is developing compact dual-arm robots for picking strawberries in polytunnels, while Saga Robotics in Norway envisages a strawberry-picking module for its Thorvald autonomous vehicle platform.
40
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 20 November 2020
PHOTO: ROBOTICS PLUS
Curious about the Field Robots Catalogue? Visit:
http://misset.com/field-robots/
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 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
