ScaleForImpact: Enabling robots to have a real impact on the soft fruit industry

Uncertainty over access to seasonal migrant labour is placing the otherwise vibrant UK fresh produce and soft fruit production under unprecedented pressure. The immediate impacts of Brexit and COVID-19 have and are restricting availability to the 69,000 seasonal migrant workers who travel to the UK each year to harvest over £1bn of fruit and vegetables. Robotics and automation technology offers a permanent solution that can disconnect the sector from its labour dependency, whilst also creating high skilled jobs and growth for the UK robotics sector. However, critical challenges remain to develop robotic technology that can be scaled in such a way that it will have a significant impact on the industry. This will require thousands of robots to be deployed over the next few years to perform a wide variety of tasks such as picking, plant protection, inspection, etc. Currently, no agricultural robotics companies are able to scale their robot deployment at a speed that will have a significant impact on the industry within the next couple of years.

Robots have proven their potential in agriculture by delivering spraying, mechanical and precision weeding, UV treatment and many other services as a commercial service to growers. The number of robots operating at a commercial scale in open fields globally is very low (not currently anticipated to be more than a few thousand). There is a need for a few very specific technological advances and operational changes before we are in a position to scale this globally. This project will develop the fundamental and underpinning technology that will take us from deploying a few robots to selected growers to a position where we deploy hundreds of robots delivering commercial services at a wider scale across the UK by 2024\.

Our project synthesises and demonstrates the outputs of multiple Innovate UK funded research and innovation projects. It represents the last step towards full large-scale deployment of agricultural robots in soft fruit production. While previous projects have developed technology that underpin the services that Saga Robotics are currently providing to commercial customers today at a small scale (~30 robots), this project will focus on developing fundamental technology needed to scale agricultural robots in the UK. The identified technological gaps are related to efficient and cost-effective deployment and operation of robots in the open field without the need for constant supervision by humans.