Features
The LaserWeeder robot by Seattle-based Carbon Robotics
future for farming, according to the company’s director of business development, Peter Ferguson. “Labor is tight and expensive, and we identified agri - culture as being a really good place to bring robotics and automation,” he says. “Traditionally, robotics has been used in factories for very specific tasks, and as technology has improved, the ability to use robotics in environments like farming has become more realistic.” To date, Advanced Farm has built robotic harvest- ers for strawberries and apples, as well as automation equipment for packing. “These have all been built on the premise of helping farmers reduce their labor burden,” notes Ferguson. At the same time, he admits that some tasks remain challenging for robotic harvesters to perform, namely handling delicate fruits and being able to judge the opti- mum moment of ripeness and color. “These are difficult tasks for robots,” says Ferguson. “Certainly our robots are still under development, but we’re getting closer to a point where we can fully commercialize the technology.” The reason Ferguson says Advanced Farm decided to focus on strawberries and apples is that they are “two of the biggest produce categories.” Apples, in particular, are conducive to automation thanks to innovations in growing practices such as trellises, which open up the tree canopy and make the fruit more accessible. “Our goal is to get to the point where cost is cheaper than traditional human crews. That really comes down to being able to pick fruit fast enough and at a high enough quality that it can justify the cost of the machine,” he adds.
To date, the company’s robots have picked over 5 mil - lion strawberries and over 200,000 apples.
Turning Concepts Into a Reality Across the Atlantic, U.K.-based Cambridge Consultants is another company close to the origin of agricultural robot- ics development. “Start-ups come to us, and we turn their ideas into reality,” says Chris Roberts, the engineering design company’s head of industrial robotics. “Everything we work on has a commercial goal. We help our clients get out into the field.” To this end, Cambridge Consultants has worked on solu - tions such as grippers that pick fruit without damaging it and vision systems that can detect where fruit is located and whether it is ripe or not. “For a long time robotics and auto- mation were about dull, repetitive motions, but that doesn’t work in agri-tech,” explains Roberts. “There’s so much natural variation — you have different lighting conditions in the field, so therefore you need to make your robots much smarter and much more sensitive, and that typically takes the form of some combination of vision and touch, and then some form of AI to extract the data from those sensors.” At the same time, Roberts says a key objective for com - panies such as Cambridge Consultants is understanding what tasks people don’t want to do on farms and identify - ing those that can be automated. “Around the world, there’s more and more pressure on labor and fewer and fewer people willing to work on farms,” he says. “However, the farm environment is complex and difficult, and you’re never going to be able
Vision Magazine 41
October/November 2023
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