Minimal Viable Picker

The UK soft fruit industry employs about 30.000 seasonal workers. Most of these are migrant workers who stay during planting and harvesting season. Labour supply in the UK is already suffering due to Brexit, and this will get drastically worse with restrictions on mobility of workers due to COVID-19\. Growers are finding it extremely hard to get the necessary number of workers to be able to keep production at normal levels. Shortage of workers will put the entire soft fruit industry at risk. With COVID-19, this problem has become more imminent and has significantly increased the need for quick solutions. Robotic harvesters are seen as one of the most promising solutions, but it has taken a lot of effort to develop these, and they are still not market ready. To speed up the launch of this robot, this project proposes to provide an early version of this system to growers in smaller numbers this season and in larger number for the next season. The system will only pick single strawberries, and not berries in clusters, which accounts for 30-70% of the berries depending on the variety.This will mitigate some of the lack of migrant workers for strawberry growers over the next couple of years.