The Question
High-wire tomato agriculture requires incredibly demanding manual labor. As the plant grows along a wire, employees must flip a hook at the top to lower the plant and give it more space to climb. With high volume production, employees often work at a speed of 2 seconds per plant, having to flip hundreds of thousands of units in a single greenhouse. This must all be done with high precision, because no plant can be dropped.
Our Answer
We have built a prototype of a robotic manipulator with a custom end-effector to detect, grasp, and turn the hooks to lower a plant. The manipulator is intended to sit on a mobile platform with autonomous navigation capabilities
“Imagine flipping thousands of plants all day, this is a highly automatable process”
Partners and Collaborators:
VDL ETG, RoboHouse, TU Delft, NXTGEN HIGHTECH