VESCA

Strawberry harvesting is a labour intensive task that depends critically on the availability of a large amount of low-cost labour. Growers are increasingly vulnerable to labour market price fluctuations and burdened by high employment overheads. Building on Dogtooth's proof of concept strawberry picking robot (developed during Innovate UK project Ananassa), project Vesca will deliver commercially viable picking performance using cutting edge machine learning and computer vision techniques to facilitate more efficient localization of target fruit (by more nearly optimal control of robot motion) and more accurate determination of suitability for picking. The project will also provide ancillary benefits such as yield mapping and prediction that are of significant importance to growers.