AGRICULTURE
to move a robot to pick it. Ten you’ve got to move a robot around the farm to remove what it picked. So you need machine vision.’ It is this issue that one of the LIAT’s latest
projects is designed to address. Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the Innovate UK council, the £2.5m Robot Highways project was set up to help tackle labour shortages in soft fruit farming and the need for global food production, while reducing the environmental impact of the farming sector. LIAT was part of a successful consortium
selected to deliver the project. It will lead the academic contribution for robot development and co-ordinating the fleet control system. Te team believes that the work could be key to industry sustainability by reducing sector reliance on seasonal labour, estimating a 40 per cent reduction in labour required. Te aim is to deliver the project across the UK by 2025, with a fleet of robots able to perform a number of farming functions as one operation, powered by renewable energy. Solutions will also be provided for moving the sector to a carbon zero future. Te consortium estimates that it will cut fruit waste by 20 per cent, reduce fungicide use by 90 per cent, lower use of fossil fuel across farm logistic operations, and increase farm productivity by 15 per cent. Pearson said: ‘I’m delighted that
The Robot Highways project was set up to help address labour shortages in soft fruit farming. Saga Robotics will supply its Thorvald robot
industry,’ he said. ‘We’ve also got a £6.3m global centre of excellence in agricultural robotics called Lincoln Agri Robotics, which was funded by Research England. We are very dependent for all of this on machine vision, which makes it a really interesting area of research. What we’re trying to do is machine vision in very, very challenging environments with optically variable objects. If we can crack the vision nut, it unlocks lots of applications for agri-robotics, and the impact is really significant.’ Te use of agri-robotics can reduce the
impact of chemicals used in agriculture in a number of ways. Robotic weeding, for example, will use vision technology to image plants to identify the weed from the crop,
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‘If we can crack the vision nut, it unlocks lots of applications for agri-robotics’
and kill only the weeds. However, there is another issue for agriculture that has intensified during the pandemic – a lack of people to pick the fruit at the critical time. Pearson elaborated: ‘Labour to pick fruit of age is a massive issue with the reduction in seasonal workers. For robotic picking to be an alternative for fruits and vegetables, you’ve got to identify an object to be able
opportunities are being realised for the sector, and agri-food robotics specifically. With fruit and vegetable picking, you have very complex occluded structures, so you need 3D vision.’ An example he gave was imaging strawberries in 3D to measure their size. Two of the university’s research partners
are also consortium members for the Robotic Highways project – UK soft fruit marketing co-operative, Berry Gardens Growers, and Saga Robotics. Te latter will supply robots and autonomous systems for the project, such as the modular robot Torvald. It can operate in open fields, tunnels, orchards and greenhouses, performing tasks such as light treatment for disease management, picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage production, spraying, and data collection
g APRIL/MAY 2021 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE 17
LIAT and Saga Robotics
LIAT and Saga Robotics
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