Advances in robotic agriculture for crops

Oberti, R.; Shapiro, Amir

doi:10.1016/j.biosystemseng.2016.05.010

Cited by 22 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Robotic fruit harvesters are being developed that can locate and pick individual fruit from within a canopy without damage to assist with the growing labour requirements (Bac, Henten, Hemming, & Edan, ; Font et al, ; Fu et al, ; Longsheng et al, ; Oberti & Shapiro, ; Silwal et al, ). A key challenge to convert this study into a commercial product is developing a harvester with a commercially viable operational time or ‘cycle‐time’ (Bac et al, ).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvements to and large‐scale evaluation of a robotic kiwifruit harvester

Williams

Ting

Nejati

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

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The growing popularity of kiwifruit orchards in New Zealand is increasing the already high demand for seasonal labourers. A novel robotic kiwifruit harvester has been designed and built to help meet this demand [H. A. Williams et al. Biosystems Eng. 181 (2019), pp. 140–156]. Early evaluations of the platform have shown good results with the system capable of harvesting 51.0% of 1,456 kiwifruit in four bays with an average cycle‐time of 5.5 s/fruit. However, the harvester's high cycle‐time, and high fruit loss rate at 23.4%, prevent it from being commercially viable. This paper presents two new developments for the harvesting system, a new vision system and two new gripper variations designed to overcome the harvester's previous limitations. Furthermore, we have designed and conducted the largest real‐world evaluation of a robotic fruit harvesting system published to date with over 12,000 kiwifruit involved. The results of this trial demonstrated that our kiwifruit harvester is one of the most effective selective fruit harvesters in the world capable of successfully harvesting 86.0% of reachable fruit, and 55.8% of all kiwifruit with a cycle‐time of 2.78 s/fruit.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvements to and large‐scale evaluation of a robotic kiwifruit harvester

Williams

Ting

Nejati

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Robotic fruit harvesters are being developed that can locate and pick individual fruit from within a canopy without damage (Bac, Henten, Hemming, & Edan, ; Font et al, ; Fu et al, ; Longsheng et al, ; Oberti & Shapiro, ; Silwal et al, ). An apple harvester has been shown to be capable of harvesting 84% of fruit attempted with an average picking time of 6 s per fruit (Silwal et al, ).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Robotic fruit harvesters are being developed that can locate and pick individual fruit from within a canopy without damage (Bac, Henten, Hemming, & Edan, 2014;Font et al, 2014;Fu et al, 2015;Longsheng et al, 2015;Oberti & Shapiro, 2016;Silwal et al, 2017).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autonomous pollination of individual kiwifruit flowers: Toward a robotic kiwifruit pollinator

Williams

Nejati

Hussein

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

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There is an increasing concern that the traditional approach of natural kiwifruit pollination by bees may not be sustainable. The alternatives are currently too costly for most growers due to high labor requirements or inefficient usage of expensive pollen. This paper presents a performance evaluation of a novel kiwifruit pollinating robot designed to provide a more efficient, reliable, and cost‐effective means of producing kiwifruit. The robot comprises a novel air‐assisted sprayer, a machine vision system employing convolution neural networks, and a flower targeting system for efficient and effective application of pollen to individual flowers. We show that this pollination system is capable of individually targeting and pollinating 79.5% of flowers at 3.5 km/hr while using comparable amounts of pollen to commercial Cambrian operators. Furthermore, flowers that were successfully pollinated at 1 km/hr grew into the first robotically pollinated kiwifruit which were comparable in quality to commercially grown kiwifruit. However, the overall fruit set was found to be well below commercial requirements and further work on increasing the overall yield is required.

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“…Agricultural operations are conducted in complex and dynamic environments (Kondo and Ting, 1998;Bechar, 2010), requiring more sophisticated robotic systems. This requirement is often suggested as a principal barrier to technology development and application in agriculture (Bechar and Vigneault, 2016;Oberti and Shapiro, 2016). A critical associated factor limiting the application of ARS in agriculture has been a lack of economic justification, but this shortcoming will likely be overcome as allied technologies become more affordable (Bergtold et al, 2009).…”

Section: Optimization Of Machine Operationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Investment in advanced agricultural technologies has increased by 80% annually since 2012 (Walker et al, 2016). A major portion of these investments has been focused on automation, and great interest exists specifically in new robotic technologies (Tillett, 2003;Oberti and Shapiro, 2016). Many agricultural operations are suited to automation, with vehicles commonly operating in large, well-defined open areas relatively free of obstructions and personnel.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autonomous Technologies in Agricultural Equipment: A Review of the State of the Art

2019

2019 Agricultural Equipment Technology Conference

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Advances in robotic agriculture for crops

Cited by 22 publications

References 17 publications

Improvements to and large‐scale evaluation of a robotic kiwifruit harvester

Improvements to and large‐scale evaluation of a robotic kiwifruit harvester

Autonomous pollination of individual kiwifruit flowers: Toward a robotic kiwifruit pollinator

Autonomous Technologies in Agricultural Equipment: A Review of the State of the Art

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