Wired UK – September 2019

AGRO FOOD ROBOTICS

Robotic pepper-harvesting

The sweet pepper harvesting

robot SWEEPER (shown below),

developed by WUR with partners

in Israel, Sweden and Belgium,

glides between plants. Its robotic

arm, fitted with an “end-effector”

• the device that interacts with the
  world – scans for mature peppers.
  SWEEPER’s camera snaps images,
  evaluating colour to classify
  maturity, and producing a distance
  map to record the location of the
  pepper for precision harvesting.
  When the fruit is ripe, SWEEPER’s
  arm reaches out and picks, dropping
  the pepper into a crate.
  Powering SWEEPER’s progress is
  a far less flashy technology: pheno-
  typing. “The essence of quite a few of
  the automated devices, for farmers
  and growers, is the eye and the brain
  of the machine,” explains Rick van
  de Zedde, a senior plant scientist
  and co-ordinator of the Agro Food

Robotics initiative at WUR. “And

phenotyping is all about collecting

information about how the plant

actually performs, using cameras

or other kinds of sensors.”

Robotics has transformed what

was once the cumbersome, manual

task of phenotyping. This quanti-

tative assessment of the traits of a

plant provides breeders, researchers

and engineers with the keys to

understanding what makes a plant

flourish or fall prey to disease, and

how it withstands climate change.

Agritech robotics is what makes

products such as SWEEPER good

at their jobs. But robots developed

by WUR – such as the Pheno-

vator, for measuring the photo-

synthetic capacity of a plant, and

the PhenoBot, a robotic system for

phenotyping tomato plants using a

3D-light-field camera – gather the

data that power their robot siblings.

In 2018, the Dutch government

announced a national project at

Wageningen called the Netherlands

Plant Eco-Phenotyping Centre, to

develop high-throughput pheno-

typing at a far greater speed. “Then

we can tackle the challenge of more

healthy or more disease- resistant

crops that you don’t have to spray

with all kinds of chemicals,” says van

de Zedde. “The phenotyping domain

will be coming closer to the real life

applications searched for by growers

and breeders and farmers.”

Food focus _

Efficiency of traditional

sodium greenhouse

lights: 1.8 μmol/joule

(the metric for light

efficiency in crops)

Efficiency of greenhouse

LEDs: up to 3 μmol/joule

The challenge: LEDs

present a far higher

upfront investment

cost for growers – two

or three times that of

traditional lights

Food focus _

Financial damage

caused by food fraud: up

to £32 billion a year

The challenge:

Developing quick, cost-

effective technologies

to test the authenticity

of products, including

hand-held scanners

Food focus _

The Netherlands is

second only to the US in

food exports by value.

The US is 240 times the

size of the Netherlands

The challenge: The

continuing development

of precision agriculture

to meet accelerating

global food needs

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