A robot made of several smaller robotic pieces can autonomously transform its body into shapes best suited for a particular task. 

Before the first harvest robot drives through the greenhouses, millions of cucumbers will still be manually picked. However, robots are already working in packing and sorting. Beltech is one of the companies focused on the development of a harvest robot, but the company has already delivered a packing robot as well.

New Zealand’s largest apple grower-exporter T&G Global has begun using a robotic harvester on a commercial apple crop in what it describes as a “world-first”.

Near the Dutch village IJsselmuiden stands the world’s first robot sorting and packing line in cucumber cultivation. Last year, the Vahl brothers introduced this innovative robot line to improve the speed and quality of the sorting process and optimize personnel deployment.

It is a dynamic spectacle to see the sorting and packing line in full action in Vahl’s processing area. It starts with manually feeding the cucumbers, according to Dutch magazine In Greenhouses. The cucumbers slide over conveyor belts towards the weighing line. After determining the weight, the machine takes 3-dimensional photos of each fruit from above using vision technology. At that moment, the shape, thickness, length, and weight are recorded. This information is forwarded by the software to one of the seven robots hanging in a row above the conveyor belt. The gripper arms of these robots swiftly pick up each cucumber with their suction cups and stack them in crates next to the conveyor belt. The operator can set the desired crate and sorting via the machine’s dashboard.

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“With this system, we can easily switch between crates, which is beneficial as we serve many different customers. In the morning, we often use six or seven types of packaging,” says Kees Vahl. He knows it is efficient to process three sorts simultaneously. “If you set only one at a time, the robots stand idle too often.” The speed at which the robot arms move is astonishing. Picking and packing one fruit takes a maximum of one second. The sorting line can process twenty thousand cucumbers per hour and 140,000 per day when running at full capacity.

What is Holding Back Agricultural Robotics

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Labor savings

The choice for automation in greenhouse horticulture is largely about labor savings. As Vahl indicated: labor is becoming increasingly expensive, but reducing monotonous work is also a motivation for him. “This is the future. I prefer to deploy my people elsewhere rather than for packing. When the line runs optimally, we only need six people: two for feeding, two for manual packing, someone to prepare crates and boxes, and a process operator. Previously, fifteen people were sorting and packing.”

Our vision is insensitive to UV radiation and polarized light. Other species, such as desert ants, on the other hand, use UV and polarized light for navigation. These tiny creatures can cross a few hundred meters in direct sunlight without getting lost.

In a greenhouse in Belgium, a small robot moves through rows of strawberries growing on trays suspended above the ground, using machine vision to locate ripe, flawless berries, then reaching up with a 3D-printed hand to gently pluck each berry and place it in a basket for sale.

Welcoming a new agricultural machine raises many questions – its management, its adaptation to a specific environment, its profitability, its long-term efficiency…

The SwagBot and the more affordable option Digital Farmhand, both from Australian startup Agerris, are now being commercialised and will be available in Australia and overseas.
 
As a professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Sydney, Salah Sukkarieh and his team have been developing air and ground robotic solutions for the agricultural industry since 2005. Their research at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics resulted in the founding of startup Agerris.

Prototypes of the SwagBot robot have recently been tested and proved to be useful for weeding, pasture monitoring, soil sampling and animal monitoring. Agerris has since then raised $ 6.5 million from Uniseed, Carthona Capital and BridgeLane Group, for building commercial smaller than tractor-sized robots.

Low cost robotics for the agricultural industry
The work on the robots started after Sukkarieh received funding from a cattle grower to look at low cost robotics for the agricultural industry in general. “Because it was a donor fund, I felt that one of the robots we should build was for the grazing livestock industry”, he explains.

Recently, Agerris was able to test 2 prototypes of the SwagBot. Sukkarieh: “Testing has gone really well. We built 2 versions of the SwagBot and were able to demonstrate them on different grazing livestock farms. The technology has now been spun off to be commercialised.”

Identifying and eradicating weeds
Farmers can use the robots for identifying and eradicating weeds, monitor pastures, row and tree crops and for monitoring animal welfare and herd cattle. “SwagBot can traverse around very difficult environments such as undulating terrain, over logs, rocks and ditches”, says Sukkarieh. “It can automatically detect weeds and spray them. SwagBot can also detect individual animals with the hope of detecting any sickness in animals.”

The SwagBot has sensors on board such as GPS, vision and laser that provide navigation and collision avoidance information to the computing system on board. It works with onboard path planning and control algorithms that help the robot go around obstacles and track animals.

SwagBot works together with drone
The SwagBot also has the ability to work together with a drone. The drone provides high level mapping information of the terrain and detecting weeds in general so that SwagBot can define more accurate planning to those weeds and can easier avoid obstacles. It is battery powered and can get about 6 hours of activity before recharge. The recharge can happen at solar points around the farm.

The other robot Agerris built is the Digital Farmhand. This robot was designed for row and tree crops and gives small-scale farmers around the world a cheaper option. “It is meant to focus on low cost applications for farmers and for mums and dads”, emphasises Sukkarieh. “It has on board sensing and machine learning algorithms that help build models of individual plants. This way we can minimise the amount of chemicals used for spraying and weeding, as well as help farmers understand their crop growth characteristics.”

Sukkarieh says a better environment management, such as better care of weeds or better management of animals can save farmers money.

Useful addition to the aging Australian agricultural workforce
The robots can also be a useful addition to the aging Australian agricultural workforce, he explains. “Working on the land is very hard and farmers are getting older. With the robotics technologies we are building, we are able to assist farmers with the daily chores on the farm.”

The robots can potentially excite the next generation of farmers as well. Sukkarieh: “We now have a program were the Digital Farmhand is taken to schools for a term and the kids learn how to code the robots in an agriculture setting.”

Prices not yet known
Both SwagBot and Digital Farmhand are now being commercialised. Sukkarieh says he cannot yet name a price, since Agerris just started the commercialisation process. “We will know more as we work closely with farmers. However, they are meant to be low cost solutions for all growers.”

The latest research of Sukkarieh is focusing on non-chemical solutions to weeding and robotics for crop manipulation such as fruit harvesting.

Tractor manufacturer Yanmar continues to convert normal tractors into robot tractors. There are already 50 converted autonomous tractors operational in Japan.

With the introduction of agriculture drones and robots, several concerns related to the growth of farm produce can be resolved, including the shifting structure of the agriculture workforce along with the problem of decreasing arable land as compared to the fast-growing population.

When Oli Madgett moved from the UK to Australia in 2014, little did he predict that the digital skills he had used in his old job, developing interactive voting systems for TV programmes such as The X Factor, would come in handy in his next venture: winemaking.

Using a Robotti tool carrier a 70% reduction in herbicide usage in sugar beets was achieved in Denmark.

The Open Deep Learning Toolkit for Robotics project aims to develop a new form of modular, open and non-proprietary ‘all-round’ artificial intelligence toolkit for core robotic functionalities.

Operators of Eastern Canada’s first DOT Power-Platform are very enthused with its performance so far.

An organic farm with half-timbering in the shade of tall trees, a crowing rooster, everything there. But organic does not mean that the scythe and horse plow are used here.

When UK farmers found themselves short-staffed due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, the government launched a campaign urging the public to cover the shortfall and “Pick for Britain”.

Sophisticated sensory capability and versatile dexterity make humans ideal for selective harvesting of delicate crops such as asparagus.

Ontario ag-service company Haggerty Creek uses small, adaptable robot to complete time-consuming tasks.

Fendt’s Xaver field robot now has 3 instead of 4 wheels, and is equipped with a seeding unit with a disc coulter.

A Dutch strawberry grower built his own spraying robot. Although this autonomous vehicle looks like a prototype, it has proven to be fully operational and is being deployed without problems in strawberry tunnels