Check out this great article by Jennifer Hicks on the next generation of robotics in the global agricultural arena published in Forbes.com. Agriculture might be the last place you would think to look for robots. To be more specific, high value crops such as greenhouse vegetables, fruits in orchards and grapes for premium wines. But it does make sense. Anything that technology can do to foster the sustainable development of agriculture benefits the world.
A new project that’s part of the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7) cRops (Clever Robots for Crops) is focusing on creating robots to harvest high value crops.
The cRops robotic platform will be capable of site-specific spraying (targeted spraying only on foliage and selected targets) and selective harvesting of fruit. The robots will be able to detect the fruit, sense its ripeness, then move to grasp and softly detach only the ripe fruit. Another objective of cRops is to develop techniques for reliable detection and classification of obstacles and other objects to enable successful autonomous navigation and operation in plantations and forests.
Projects like cRrops are significant because they can accelerate sustainable development of agriculture.
– Catherine Simon, Innorobo
The European project, made up of universities and labs from 10 different countries including Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Slovenia, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Germany, Chile and France started in October 2010, but sources say it will take at least five more years before it could be commercialized. So why is Europe moving so slowly in terms commercializing robots and moving them into mass market?
“One of the main reasons is simply because robotics is still in an early stage of maturity and we continue to see projects coming out of academia, government or EU commissions,” said Catherine Simon, Founder and organizer of Innorobo, the leading robotics conference taking place in Lyon, France in 2013. “Europe needs to make the shift from projects to product faster like the United States if we want to remain a leader in the the field of robotics. If the cRops project were to focus on detecting one specific type of fruit, it might be a shorter path to market. But in this case, with multiple countries, government funding, demand for subsidies and coordination across associated agencies, it slows the innovation process.”
Simon’s point about targeting a specific fruit or problem is key. Harvest Automation, based in Boston, MA, raised $7.8 million in a series B funding round in November 2011. Harvest is focusing on agricultural robotics and focusing on greenhouse and nursery automation. They want to resolve acute manual labor problems across multiple industries but are starting with agriculture. The Harvest Automation robot costs around $25 to $50k and because the manipulation requirements of the robots are lower in this sector, the company focus on creating a viable business, reducing costs and higher yields, rather than worrying about how to incorporate expensive robot arms into their operations.
But, there are other fruit picking robots on the loose. In Japan in 2010 the Institute of Agricultural Machinery’s Bio-oriented Technology Research Advancement Institution, created a strawberry picking robot with a stereo camera system that images the strawberries in 3D and image-processing algorithms determine their ripeness. If a strawberry is at least 80 percent red, the machine snips it at the stem and puts it in a padded bin. It can harvest 60% of the strawberry crop, taking only nine seconds to pick a strawberry. But, according to a machine-vision specialist who worked on the strawberry picking project, this robot won’t happen without government subsidies.
But times are changing. We are starting to see a true shift in the ecosystem surrounding robotics – moving from a heavily academic foundation to a more entrepreneurial approach. In 2011, Hizook reported that VC funding in robotics surpassed $160 million, with Restoration Robotics taking a whopping $43 million (an image-guided hair transplant robot). And with outsiders like Dmitry Grishin, Founder, Grishin Robotics, believing it’s time to open up the insular world of robotics to entrepreneurs and raise the profile of the robotics industry, and insiders like Bruno Bonnell, Robultion Capital in France establishing Europe’s first robotics fund dedicated to service robotics toGoogle investing quietly in robotics in the form of cars that drive themselves, the race is on.
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