A Picking Robot for a Greenhouse
A picking robot from ETH spin-off Floating Robotics automates important tasks such as defoliation, harvesting, and packaging of vegetables. Although the robot is still in the pilot phase, the team expects it to play an integral role in Beerstecher AG in Hinwil’s production process. Watch this video to learn more.
“The robot primarily takes over strenuous and repetitive activities, allowing our employees to focus on more demanding tasks that require a creative and critical mindset," explains Bianca Curcio , who is responsible for production management in the Beerstecher greenhouse and is an ETH Zurich alumna.
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Transcript
00:00:02 the conditions of a greenhouse is not really comfortable for human we are talking about 80% humidity temperatures in summer days up to like 30 35° and the working in a greenhouse in these conditions is like so uncomfortable for a robot this doesn't matter and the robot can actually also work overnight and it can automate more depending on the autonomy of the
00:00:29 robot the robot is basically observing crops with his cameras it also has the ability to move the perspective and see from different angles then it recognizes objects with the computer here and then it commands the arm to go and pick it at that 3D position so the robot basically opens the box and fills it with whatever crop
00:00:54 it's harvesting and after that the robot Waits until the boxing system exchanges this field box with another empty1 automation is happening in all the industries so why not also in the green houses we have so many standardized processes and we have so many manual labor to find workers during season can be sometimes tough I think in
00:01:19 the end the robot does not really substitute to people but in the end I just need less people do the same work the people can do better jobs than just harvesting the the hard workare uh that means also for me less risk that if they have few people in the season that I can put them in in works that a robot is not really able to do or not yet