The growing world population is calling for a new wave of innovations in agriculture, with the objective to produce more food in a sustainable way. Smart and automated indoor farming is seen as a way to extend the crops production throughout the year, independently from weather conditions.
However, despite recent technological advances in processes automation, much of labor-intensive greenhouse operations are still performed manually. This is due to the fact that even most advanced robots are not able to deal with a “living” environments, where the unpredictability is a key factor.
In fact, unlike to industrial production lines, lighting conditions in agriculture are extremely variable, thus robot optics must be adaptable, so as the handling (gripping) tool has to be when dealing with the soft fruits.
The lack of automation is a real bottleneck hindering an effective greenhouse management.
This owes to substantial demographic shifts where the interest in manual labor as an occupation is decreasing globally and workfoce shortage brings dramatic consequences in many countries: this leads to 20% - 30% unharvested crops left to rot, meaning millions dollars of economic losses to growers.1
At Metomotion we are making greenhouse farming more sustainable and profitable by introducing GRoW (Greenhouse Robotic Worker), the 1st multi-purpose robotic solution for greenhouse farming.
Thanks to the proprietary advanced 3D vision system and machine learning based computational algorithms, as well as flexible picking system and autonomous driving, GRoW is fully automated harvesting and boxing system poised to meet all relevant market requirements:
- accurate (error rate < 5 %)
- fast (harvesting rate > 550 kg/hour)
- easy to use and cost-effective, with an expected payback time of less than 3 years.
The project prepares the commercial GRoW launch, starting from the current TRL6 level.
The focus is to ensure that the overall assembly process is designed to meet the standards of large-scale manufacturing process.
