Award details

3D Vision Assisted Robotic Harvesting of Broccoli

Reference	BB/N004841/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Tom Duckett
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Grzegorz Cielniak, Professor Simon Pearson
Institution	University of Lincoln
Department	School of Computer Science
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	87,462
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/06/2015
End date	31/08/2016
Duration	15 months

Abstract

There is an urgent need to reduce the costs of production of field brassica crops, in particular broccoli. Labour costs are a significant proportion of overall production costs, high labour usage also drives complex management and potentially social issues. In this project we will test whether low-cost commercial 3D camera technology can be used to identify and select broccoli which are ready to harvest within commercial crops. This will provide a key underpinning step towards the development of a fully automatic and camera guided robotic harvesting system for broccoli. The commercial benefits are highly significant, the broccoli crop is one of the worlds largest vegetable crops, and almost all of it is manually harvested.

Summary

Impact Summary

The project has the potential to derive a high level of economic and social benefit. The economic benefits will be exploited by the growers of broccoli within the UK. The social benefits will be in terms of public health, in that it will control the costs of broccoli selling price, enticing consumers to purchase a healthy food. It will reduce the need for manual labour to conduct a highly laborious, difficult and physically demanding job. These conditions result if increasing recruitment difficulties for growers, and absorb high levels of migrant workers. Given that the broccoli production industry is clustered in very few locations, the labour influx to relatively small settlements can place high pressure on local services. The impact of this proposal in terms of the industry and social consequences are very high, but the project carries some risk as the main challenge has yet to be resolved. On this basis we believe that the project is highly appropriate for public funding from Innovate, and should provide a high level of return. There is no doubt that there are many challenges which the UK agriculture face in terms of developing improved vision analysis and robotic harvesting systems. This project will help develop capacity in a key industry area which is required to achieve the general government objective of the sustainable intensification of UK agriculture. A key positive step of this proposal is that is facilitates the transfer of the engineering, computing and robotics skills of the University of Lincoln into R Fountain and Son.

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	Agri-Tech Catalyst (ATC) [2013-2015]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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