The agriculture environment is a very challenging environment for introducing robotics. A commercial company which produces advanced greenhouse technologies dealt with the actual hardware integration and is supposed to further exploit the research results. All experiments were accommodated by a leading dutch grower who was an active partner. Along the project we consulted with a Growers Advisory Board who provided plenty of good advice. The computer science group at Umea University was responsible for high level robot control and software systems engineering Advanced obstacle detection algorithms were developed by researchers at Wageningen Research Center who also coordinated the project and led the actual applied testing in the greenhouses.Ī unique aspect of this project was the crop optimization performed by an applied research station for vegetable production in Belgium –the optimal crop for the robot and was selected along with optimizing its growth by different horticultural practices. The researchers from the departments of industrial engineering and computer science from Ben-Gurion University led the development of computer vision and task planning algorithms for detection, localization and fruit maturity classification. A key aspect of the development was close collaboration with horticulture experts and farmers from start and continuous testing in the greenhouse. In the consortium a wide-range of researchers from a multitude of disciplines worked closely together along 3.5 years to produce the first commercial harvesting robot, including: horticulture, horticultural engineering, machine vision, sensing, robotics, control, intelligent systems, software architecture, system integration and greenhouse crop management.Įach of the international teams was assigned to a specific problem, and through strong continuous cooperation advanced and produced solutions that not only worked – but worked together as an integrative system. The consortium included fundamental and applied research organizations (Wageningen University & Research / Stichting Wageningen Research (NL), Umea University, Sweden, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, Proefstationvoor de Groenteteelt – PSKW (BE)), an industrial company as system integrator (B&A Automation: – BOGAERTS (BE)) and a modern grower of sweet pepper from the Netherlands. The project involved 6 partners from 4 different countries (The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Israel). SWEEPER a Horizon 2020 project which just concluded aimed to use the technology developed in CROPS to introduce, test and validate a robotic harvesting solution for sweet pepper under real-world conditions. One of the applications was a sweet pepper harvesting robot. In the EU-FP7-project CROPS ( extensive research was performed on agricultural robotics. The current state of the art in automated harvesting of fruits and vegetables has remained remarkably stationary in the past decades. Harvesting is one of the few tasks that have not yet been automated. In today’s cutting edge greenhouses all sorting, packaging and fruit transportation is performed automatically with the human serving only as a supervisor. This need has brought automation to almost all elements of greenhouse operation. The tedious manual labor involved in the harsh agricultural domain has led to shortage in manpower leading to rising demand for automation of the processes involved. Until now this has never been achieved and the aim was to ensure Europe’s leading role in agricultural robotics. SWEEPER’s main objective was to put the first generation greenhouse harvesting robots onto the market.
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