Horticulture

"Today's greenhouses contain more and more technology and much more is automated. These are good developments, but we mustn’t forget the human factor in these developing greenhouses," says robotics researcher Anouk Leunissen.

In May this year, the book 'Advances in agri-food robotics' was published. The book describes the progress that agrifood robotics has made in recent years and whether robotics is crucial to feeding 9 billion mouths in the future. Prof. Eldert van Henten from Wageningen University & Research co-edited the book. What does he think are the main advances that have been made?

Could farmers instead of programmers be training robots to perform certain tasks? PhD researcher Robert van den Ven investigated the use of Learning from Demonstration to teach a robot all the motions needed to harvest an apple.

Visiting a tea plantation in Zundert, the Netherlands, where Vision+Robotics researchers are developing a smart, mobile tea machine.

The combination of advanced camera techniques and automated data processing should soon enable Vision + Robotics to offer extremely reliable and fast phenotyping to other researchers and breeding companies.

Machine learning and plant phenotyping techniques could help make selection and sorting of healthy young plants easier for growers.