RASberry - Robotics and Automation Systems for berry production

The RASberry funding programme (Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Berry Production) aims to develop autonomous fleets of robots for the horticultural industry.

The first major objective is to support in-field transportation operations to aid and complement human fruit pickers, followed by other objectives on applications such as plant treatment, yield forecasting and fruit picking. To achieve this goal, the project bridges several current technological gaps including the development of a mobile platform suitable for strawberry fields, software components for fleet management, in-field navigation and mapping, fruit perception and dexterous picking, long-term operation, and safe human-robot collaboration.

RASberry is a collaboration between academia, the robotics industry, and strawberry growers to cover multidisciplinary competencies required for successful delivery of the project.

FUNDING

  • GRASPberry: High speed picking soft fruit robots

    IUK #104587 £997K
    24 months, project start: Oct 2017

  • Autonomous robots to support fruit picking

    IUK #103339 £1,265K
    21 months, project start: Jan 2019

PEOPLE

PEOPLE

Programme coordination
Pål Johan From (Norway), Grzegorz Cielniak (UK)

Academic Staff
UoL:  Paul Baxter, Nicola Bellotto, Marc Hanheide, Simon Pearson
NMBU: Lars Grimstad
CERTH: Dionysis Bochtis

Researchers
UoL: Serhan Corsar, Gautham Das, Waqas Khan, Alexander Gabriel, Raymond Kirk, Justin LeLouedec
NMBU: Ya Xiong, Yuanyue Ge, Tuan Le, Vignesh Raja, Abhishesh Pal
Saga Robotics: Halvard Grimstad, Remy Zakaria, Adam Binch, Giorgos Vasileiadis, Yannis Menexes

Publications

- From, Pal and Grimstad, Lars and Hanheide, Marc and Pearson, Simon and Cielniak, Grzegorz (2018) RASberry - Robotic and Autonomous Systems for Berry Production. Mechanical Engineering Magazine Select Articles, 140 (6). ISSN 0025-6501

- Das, Gautham and Cielniak, Grzegorz and From, Pal and Hanheide, Marc (2018) Discrete Event Simulations for Scalability Analysis of Robotic In-Field Logistics in Agriculture – A Case Study. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Workshop on Robotic Vision and Action in Agriculture, 21-25 May 2018, Brisbane.

- Baxter, Paul and Cielniak, Grzegorz and Hanheide, Marc and From, Pal (2018) Safe Human-Robot Interaction in Agriculture. In: 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

- Mason, Alex; From, Pål Johan; Korostynska, Olga.
Electromagnetic sensing for non-destructive real-time fruit ripeness detection: case-study for automated strawberry picking. EuroSensors 2018

- Xiong, Ya; From, Pål Johan; Isler, Volkan.
Design and Evaluation of a Novel Cable-Driven Gripper with Perception Capabilities for Strawberry Picking Robots. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

- Gabriel, Alexander and Bellotto, Nicola and Baxter, Paul (2019) Towards a Dataset of Activities for Action Recognition in Open Fields. In: UK-RAS Conference on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS)