FASTPICK: Novel active vision and picking head to robotically harvest soft fruit

Uncertainty over access to seasonal migrant labour is placing the otherwise vibrant UK fresh produce and soft fruit sector 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 fresh fruit and vegetables. Robotics and automation technology offers a permanent solution that can disconnect the sector from it's 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 pick fruit within dense, occluded and biologically variable clusters. Leading robotic fruit picking technology can pick 80% of strawberries at 4 seconds per berry. FASTPICK will develop active vision systems integrated to a novel robotic picking head and private 5G network that aims to pick 95% of fruit at c. 2 seconds per berry, the same performance of human harvesters. This performance removes the final technical barrier to large scale adoption of agri-robotic systems for the soft fruit sector.

FASTPICK will develop a state of the art active and dynamic vision system that uses multiple cameras, including visual servoing in the picking head to create a 3D scene of complex clusters and identify critical picking points for the gripper. FASTPICK will be implemented in a Gazebo digital twin environment that can be used to optimise picking control and as a key tool for future robotic development. High speed image processing will be optimised by integrating the system into cloud and mobile edge compute via a private 5G network. An optimised picking head and active vision system will be integrated onto the fully autonomous Thorvald robotic platform developed by Saga in collaboration with the University of Lincoln. It will be tested and demonstrated on semi-commercial crops of strawberries.

The collaboration is led by Saga Robotics Ltd in collaboration with the University of LIncoln (UoL) and leading robotic system developers Cambridge Consultants. The picking solution will be co-created with Berry Garden Growers whose cooperative members produce over 45% of the UK's soft fruit. Co-creation enables effective and responsible innovation whilst also underpinning significant, rapid and scaled routes to market for Saga. The technology will be marketed to the UK and global fresh produce sectors but secondary markets exist across multiple robotic application domains.