Fruit growing
Picking strawberry with AI: harvest robot is supposed to relieve companies
Rising wage costs in fruit growing have an impact on prices in the supermarket. A harvest robot is now to relieve fruit farmers. However, it can still take before that.
Automation in agriculture is progressing. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has introduced a robot to support fully autonomous farms in the strawberry harvest with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
According to DFKI, robot Shivaa recognizes ripe strawberries in open -air cultures with special cameras. The robot navigates along the rows of plants and picks the ripe fruits with gripping arms. Then he then places the collected strawberries in a harvest box mounted on the device.
Robot works at least eight hours
The robot should then be able to harvest about 15 kilograms of fruit, as project manager Heiner Peters said. The robot could be in use at least eight hours at a time.
However, according to Peters, it is necessary for a few years to develop the robot as standard. The project manager said that it could take up to seven years before the product can be used in larger quantities in fields.
The system is being developed, among other things, in cooperation with the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg) and is currently being tested at the Erdbeerhof Glantz in Hohen Wieschendorf (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania).
Other types of fruit could also be harvested
Shivaa is not the first fully autonomous robot that was developed for helping with the strawberry harvest. But unlike comparable systems, which work primarily in greenhouses, Shivaa was specially developed for the field cultivation, according to the DFKI. The technology can therefore also be transferred to the harvest of further types of fruit.
The manager of the Erdbeerhof Glantz, Jan van Leeuwen, is pleased in view of the growing economic pressure on the participation in the project. A good 60 percent of the production costs are wage costs, he says. “In this respect, every idea that means that we can save wage costs is welcome.”
Production costs are to be reduced
Peters hopes that the robots will reduce production costs so far that strawberries in the supermarket are offered again and that the companies in Germany can exist with more efficient production against imports from abroad. Van Leeuwen would be satisfied to at least freeze the price development of the strawberries in the medium term, as he says.
According to developers, human workers should not be replaced with the technology, but should be supported and relieved. The robot can also work at night. Companies could avoid harvest losses with robots and receive the quality of the fruits.
dpa
Source: Stern
