Tenaci

Following on from Project Idaeus, which delivered a proof of concept raspberry harvesting robot, this project Tenaci will pick up the development of two major threads of work: End-effector development and adaption of the crop to facilitate robotic harvest. Dogtooth has picked over 1.2M strawberries in the YTD 2023 using the end-effector developed through Idaeus. This level of real world testing has given a very clear understanding of the requirements for additional development work and specifies the content of this project.

The goals of project Tenaci are: an end-effector at a Technology Readiness Level that will allow mass adoption of robotic harvest through hardware sales; increased capital utilisation through performing additional tasks such as husbandry and pruning; and consistently higher robotic picking efficacy throughout the season due to consistently high quality fruit presentation.

Project Tenaci will generalise the work to understand and develop protocols for managing raspberry crops to top-fruit and project partner Adrian Scripps will drive development and validation of these protocols to development orchard architecture that both facilitates robotic harvest and maximises return on investment.