3D Vision Assisted Robotic Harvesting of Broccoli

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, as the broccoli crop is one of the worlds largest vegetable crops, and almost all of it is manually harvested.