Telecommunications company BT has announced the delivery of a robotics platform and management system, which is part of the Innovate UK-funded ‘Robot Highways’ project consortium.
The idea behind the project is to investigate how IoT and robotics can play a role in smart agriculture to galvanise automation, increase efficiency and improve sustainability practices.
Specifically, the Robot Highways project hopes to demonstrate how a fleet of robots assigned a range of tasks can interact and cooperate to form a robust and efficient supply chain operation.
BT and partners have responded to this challenge by developing a potential solution for the future of soft fruit farming, where green-powered robots can support farmers by performing manual and energy-intensive labour, including the picking of fruit and treating crops.
By bringing together robotics and IoT, the project consortium has aimed to show how key agricultural processes can be improved through automated technologies for better forecasting accuracy, increased farm productivity, reduced farm labour and reduced fruit waste and fungicide use.
Moreover, BT claims to have developed and tested edge and cloud architecture to deliver the infrastructure through which such IoT services can function.
The Robot Highways project likewise hopes to promote technology to support the farming industry’s sustainability ambitions, through reduced reliance on fossil fuels across all farming operations as part of a vision for a carbon zero future.
John Davies, chief researcher, BT, said: “We’re delighted to be part of the Robot Highways project to demonstrate how BT can help the agricultural sector to automate by integrating robotics and other solutions on a single platform.
“As a leader in network-based platforms and edge-infrastructure we are ideally placed to support advanced robotic farming operations.”
Speaking about the automation of soft fruit farming, Marc Hanheide, professor and principal investigator at the University of Lincoln and director of Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS), said: “Our focus was the coordination of multiple robots delivering different tasks that have the potential to revolutionise the production of strawberries.
“Robots autonomously and reliably transported picked fruit to a dedicated collection point and routinely counted the ripe and unripe fruit to inform forecasting models.
“To date, this is the largest robot demonstration of integrated robotic services in a soft fruit farm environment.
“It represents a major milestone on the road to automating soft-fruit production.”
The project is being led by Saga Robotics, alongside partners BT, University of Lincoln, Berry Gardens Growers Ltd, Clock House Farm, University of Reading and the Manufacturing Technology Centre.
Interested in automated agriculture? At Robotics and Automation 2022 on 01-02 November at the Coventry Building Society Arena, Marc Hanheide, professor of intelligent robotics and interactive systems at the University of Lincoln, will be discussing the Robot Highways project and automating crop care, monitoring and harvesting in soft-fruit production.
Visit www.roboticsandautomation.co.uk/conference to check out the extensive line-up of speakers and the packed conference agenda.
