Research expected to accelerate the progress of robotic harvesting in horticultural crops, such as tomatoes and strawberries, has been awarded more than £3.8 million from the large R&D partnership grant competition, part of the government’s £270 million Farming Innovation Programme.
What sets the Agri-Opencore project apart from others on robotic harvesting, however, is that it will create the world’s first open development platform for both the software and hardware needed for this application of robotics, which companies and other organisations will have access to.
Led by APS Produce, part of the APS Group, the project draws on the expertise of the Lincoln Institute of Agri-Food Technology (LIAT) at the University of Lincoln; Dogtooth Technologies, which already has picking robots at work on strawberry farms; Wootzano, which has developed a robot to fill punnets with fruit; and Xihelm, whose tomato harvesting robot is on trial at several nurseries.
LIAT says currently no robotic harvesting system can match the speed of human picking. The project is aiming to develop commercial robotic systems for tomato and strawberry harvesting that achieve human-picking cost-parity in two years, making it a more attractive proposition to growers.
“The project will lead to faster adoption of more reliable robotic technology in agriculture which will be demonstrated by developing robotic tomato and strawberry harvesting systems,” said Grzegorz Cielniak, Lincoln Agri-Robotics Centre associate professor.
