Project description
Growing robots to pick tomatoes
To meet increasing demand for quality produce year-round, greenhouses are used to grow vegetables. However, the vegetable greenhouse production sector is highly labour intensive. The EU-funded GRoW project may have the solution. It is robotics. Greenhouse robotic workers can halve the costs and reduce the amount of labour required by an astounding 80 %. The core innovations include an advanced 3D vision system to clearly identify ripe fruits among leaves and stems, touch-sensitive terminals to avoid damage and loss of fruits, and extensible multiple robotic arms to increase harvest speed.
Objective
The goal of current project is to realize the technological scale-up of the first ever efficient and cost-effective robotic harvesting system applied to greenhouse farming of tomatoes.
In fact, to date, no commercial product for automated operations on
tomatoes is available because of several technological constraints linked with the unstable environment of the indoor farming, as well as with the difficulty to grasp malleable and easily damageable fruits.
Metomotion has found solutions to all the challenging technical steps, thereby enabling profitable harvesting of tomatoes and making it possible to growers to harvest the fruits throughout the year and not being
exposed to the labor shortage.
By doing so, the harvesting costs are halved and labor reduced by 80%. In the context of thePrecision Farming approach, automation in the agricultural sector is particularly solicited and Metomotion is offering a
product capable to satisfy the most compelling needs of the growers.
The core innovations brought by Metomotion consist of:
- Advanced 3D vision system to clearly identify ripe fruits among leaves and stems
- Extensible multiple robotic arms to increase harvest speed
- Touch sensitive terminals to avoid damage and loos of fruits
- Fully autonomous vehicle embedding boxing system for the automated packing of collected fruits.
The activities of the Phase 2 projects are related with the enhancement of the prototype performance through optimization of both hardware parts like robotic arm and AGV, as wells as related SW and User Interface. Interactions with users occurred during Phase 1 project have shown immense interest toward GRoW product from all over the world (about
100 expressions of interest collected), thus paving the basis for the successful commercialization of the product. A detailed
commercialization strategy will be developed in the course of this project to allow global sales.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringautomotive engineeringautonomous vehicles
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturefruit growing
- social sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomation
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturevegetable growing
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
2161401 KARMIEL
Israel
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.