Three high-tech superheroes are making their presence known at this year’s Fieldays.
The University of Waikato has entered three of its horticultural robots in the Prototype category of the 2021 Fieldays Innovation Awards.
They are a robotic asparagus harvester, an autonomous grape vine pruner and a kiwifruit orchard survey robot. The robots are collaborative projects involving students and academics from the School of Engineering and the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences in partnership with other academic institutions and businesses.
“Agritech is very important to solving problems,” says Dr Shen Hin Lim, Senior Lecturer in Mechatronics and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waikato and Chair of NZ Robotics Automation and Sensing (NZRAS).
Robotic asparagus harvester version 1.5
“New Zealand is considered a world leader in agricultural innovation, and I believe that we can demonstrate that and have an edge using ag robots.”
Ag robots support the horticulture sector in a number of ways, automating some time-consuming tasks, enabling people to get on with other work and offering a sustainable solution to labour shortages.
Technology also helps the agricultural industry to maintain high productivity, ensure safe, high-quality food products and minimise its environmental footprint.
Lim leads the team that developed the asparagus harvester which will be on display in the Innovation Hub. The fully operational prototype was developed with the support of Callaghan Innovation, in collaboration with Robotics Plus Limited. The asparagus harvester has a high-tech vision system that detects the asparagus spears, computes their base location, and, if it detects that the spear is tall enough to harvest, uses a robotic arm to cut it as the robot passes over.
Another robot at Fieldays is the MaaraTech Grape Vine Pruner, a transdisciplinary co-design project funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, including researchers from the University of Waikato, Robotics Plus, the University of Auckland, the University of Canterbury, Lincoln Agritech, University of Otago and Plant & Food Research.
MaaraTech grape vine pruner
Auckland University holds the contract for the five-year MaaraTech project, and Waikato University is subcontracted to focus on the hardware development and physical aspects of creating the technology.
Teams from other universities have worked on different parts of the process which includes scanning and building a 3D model of the vine using cameras and sensors; detecting and measuring so the software has the necessary metrics to make a decision; then the mechatronics which take action. Dr Benjamin McGuinness, a research and teaching fellow in mechanical engineering at the University of Waikato, says the robot’s cutting blade – dubbed “the barracuda” – has evolved over many iterations and modifications of commercial secateurs by Waikato researcher Scott Harvey. Its innovative design helps ensure wires are not cut by mistake.
“The design we’ve come up with has a series of slots in the anvil of the bottom blade. The idea is, the wire will fall into the slots but the cane is too big to fit in there, so the blade will cut the
cane,” says McGuinness.
The Orchard Survey Robot was funded by Zespri to advance innovation and research in the kiwifruit industry. It uses a variety of sensors to autonomously navigate around the orchard to capture information that can provide actionable insights to growers, says Nick Pickering, a systems engineering lecturer at the University of Waikato, who is leading the project.
Dr Shen Hin Lim
It can be programmed to capture a wide range of data through the life cycle of kiwifruit growing.
“We’ll be initiating the research later in the year starting with flower counting and canopy cover, with plans to expand the collaboration into the areas of pest and disease detection, fruit estimation and plant structure,” says Pickering.
“The information from the robot will be used to support growers to make complex decisions to optimise fruit quality and quantity.”
In addition to assisting growers, there’s an opportunity to improve decision-making across the harvest, post-harvest, logistics and marketing functions.
As a “common-user robot environment”, it will promote more collaboration and knowledge-sharing across the industry.
“It’s all about being better together,” says Pickering. “We didn’t want to build just another siloed system, so we’ve designed the robot and digital twin as a reusable platform to enable many different stakeholders, including industry and academic, to integrate their specialist sensors, models or visualisation tools.”
Fieldays visitors can see the robots at the Innovation Hub.
