New Zealand Company Builds Robots That Can Pick Kiwifruit
Soon after the coronavirus pandemic began, a host of problems emerged. Behind the health risk posed by the pandemic lies another crisis.
On farms around the world, ripening fruit and vegetables that needed to be harvested, packed and sent to supermarkets instead risked rotting in the fields. Farmers are struggling to find the workers they need to bring in the harvest.
Labor shortages are a problem that has been approaching for a long time. Permanent agricultural workers are already scarce. Millions of migrant workers, students, gap-year travelers and retirees looking for extra income make up most of the seasonal workforce.
But as more and more people leave rural areas for cities, farms in many parts of the world face a growing problem: they increasingly struggle to find enough people to do this hard, dirty work.
As a result, larger producers in many areas had turned to specially recruited workers from abroad. In New Zealand, many producers rely on workers from the Pacific Islands, but when borders closed and flights stopped, the industry suddenly froze.
Governments across Europe asked employees from other industries who are currently not working due to lockdown to help with the harvest. In the UK, for example, the Prince of Wales called on an "army" of people to help harvest fruit and vegetables in the country's fields.
The coronavirus has shed light on how dangerous this situation is. As a result, farmers around the world have begun turning to technology companies for help, including Robotics Plus.
Over the past decade, the company has been developing smart robots capable of moving through orchards, recognizing fruit and picking it. This is exactly the kind of automation that could ease labor shortages and allow production to continue. Now the company wants to make sure farmers never again find themselves in such a situation.
Robotics Plus has one robot, used in the US, New Zealand and Europe, that may have helped farmers at a time when labor was short. The automated apple packer uses suction grippers to carefully pick apples from a conveyor, place them in trays and arrange them so the side with the best color faces up. To do this, it uses computer vision, recognizing the fruit, trays and apple color.
It can pack about 120 apples per minute, so it works much faster than a person and far more consistently: the robot does not get tired, and fruit has fewer dents even at maximum speed.
Although robotics is unlikely to make much difference in the immediate crisis, it focuses people's minds in a way that could speed up the shift to automation in agriculture.
But to have a real impact, automation of the entire process is necessary. That is why the company is developing autonomous ground vehicles that can move through orchards and fields. They use sensors to map the environment so they can get close to plants without damaging them.
Besides this platform, Robotics Plus is working on a number of other solutions. One of them is a kiwifruit harvester, originally developed by co-founder Alistair Scarfe during his PhD at Massey University in Palmerston North (New Zealand).
He proved that a robot can be used to identify fruit, grasp it, detach it from the plant and collect it. Mounting the robot on a mobile platform means it can pick fruit, sort it into bins by size and deliver it to the packing shed before heading back out to harvest. Kiwifruit are relatively simple because the fruit hangs from an overhead canopy, but the company hopes to use this concept to move on to other fruits.
“Some crops, such as asparagus, still require specific skills to harvest, so recruiting inexperienced people to help during the crisis proved extremely difficult. But we are also developing an automated asparagus harvester that moves along the rows, using machine vision and artificial intelligence to detect the vegetable before grasping and cutting it”
The company has already tested a prototype on farms in New Zealand and California to use what it learned to improve the technology. But it is not as simple as launching machines on a production line to ship to farmers worldwide. Producing a commercial product that farmers can use will require serious investment.
Few producers or horticultural organizations have the funds they can invest upfront to advance such technologies. But it is also more than just finding funding: collaboration is needed so the technology can work for everyone.
Today, farmers growing asparagus in different parts of the world tend their crops in different ways. Some use raised beds, others use soil mounds, and some farmers, as in New Zealand, grow asparagus on flat ground. In some places they harvest by cutting the spears above the soil surface, in others right below the soil.
With so many variations in how crops are grown and harvested, it is very difficult to create a robotic solution that works for everyone. If the industry wants to move to automation, a degree of standardization will be needed.
And this is what Robotics Plus is now working on. The company is trying to create a global consortium of farmers, producers and industry organizations it can work with. Thus, although robotics is unlikely to make much difference in the immediate crisis, it focuses people's minds to speed up the shift to automation in agriculture.
However, there are tasks that robots simply cannot perform. Robotic manipulators and machine vision systems are not very good at picking clusters of fruit that are hidden behind branches or leaves, for example. They also will not replace a farmer's experience. But robots can free people up for other tasks that cannot be automated. They can help farmers get more from their land.
“Automation will not only help reduce labor shortages in agriculture, but also protect workers by allowing them to keep their distance from others more effectively. Because fewer people touch the products, they should be more hygienic. In three to four years we may see more of this technology in the fields than we do now”
In recent months it has become clear that agriculture must change if we still want food on people's tables. If done right, the next few years could be very exciting.
