Something for the Techies out there.....Jamie Australian researchers branch out with robot farming September 2nd, 2013 Some orchardists were skeptical when the idea of robot field trials was proposed by Dr Salah Sukkarieh and his team at the University of Sydney, who sought to detect key agronomic inidicators like yield, tree health and flowering intensity. A wide range of benefits to the technology have been shown in the first two years of the project funded by Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL), but Sukkarieh’s ultimate goal is to solve Australia’s pressing issue of labor shortages through automated harvesting. “After the first year when we’d demonstrated all these things they [orchardists] were quite over the moon. Automatically what they see is not just a crop yield, not just the detection of the fruit but the potential behind all of that,” he told freshfruitportal. “At the apple farm we could go down a row, count the number of apples and could tell the farmer the crop yield. That was something they used to do once before but it was too laborious. “The fact that you could just take the robot up and down the orchard for an hour and get a crop yield was something phenomenal for them.” Photo: Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney Photo: Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney In addition to the apple field trials in Melbourne, the team has also helped growers at an almond operation in Mildura. “Last year we had detected the almonds on the tree with the robots, but this year what we decided to focus on was the flowers,” he said. “Just before the fruit set, the almond trees blossom and what farmers would like to know is the intensity of the flowering, because that governs a lot about what they expect in terms of fruit set – that tells them how much water and fertilizer they need over the next few months.” With one year of the current HAL funding remaining, Sukkarieh hoped to explore the technology’s potential on mango and banana farms in the country’s north in late 2013. He added that from a field intelligence perspective, robotics experts had already done a great deal of work in monitoring invasive species. “There’s been a lot of work in using robotic aircraft and intelligence surveillance systems and algorithms to detect invasive weeds and locus tracking, and they’re going to be applied to this horticulture project. “We can detect weeds on the ground, we’ve got high resolution sensors so we can detect insects on the trees, but there are other aspects such as the health of a tree so that’s a little bit harder. You need a bit more work and interaction with plant biologists.” A path to automated harvesting Sukkarieh said the robots, named Mantis and Shrimp, used a range of sensors to conduct field intelligence including laser vision, radar, thermal and infrared, while the team had also borrowed conductivity and gamma sensors from the university’s precision agriculture group to measure water properties and ions in the ground. As these two robots were originally built for general purpose use – particularly in areas like mining, defense and urban mapping – Sukkarieh expected the end product would look quite different for farmers. “You could actually use those sensors now and put them onto a tractor for example, and while you’re driving that you can just be collecting the data and looking at various metrics. “Obviously the desire is to go down the automation path because you can get much higher precision and 24/7 operation, but they can already use the information that we’re deriving. “To be able to harvest you first need to be able to detect the fruit.” The expert said robot harvesting could be a reality within “a couple of years” if funding were no issue, but it would most likely only be suitable for certain types of orchards. “If you look at this tree architecture that’s popular in an orchard, very much what you see is a tree and a bush canopy; these are 3D kind of arrangements and those are very hard because no matter what the fruit is, you can only harvest what’s on the outside. “To reach in to harvest what’s on the inside is going to be impossible, robotically anyway, for a long time.” He highlighted there had been a great deal of activity in changing tree shapes for biological purposes, and these same set-ups were also favorable for robot harvesting. “It’s been found out that if you grow certain crops on 2D trellises and you have these trellises turned at a certain angle to light then you get optimal photosynthesis and the most efficient type of tree, and you get to improve crop yield. “In those types of situations the fruit is hanging on one side of the tree only, and that will open up a lot of opportunities for automation. “These structures are already being used with apples for example, so you can imagine the apple industry will probably be one of the first to see automated harvesting happen.” From mining to “dining” In July, Australia’s Federal Agriculture Minister Joel Fitzgibbon coined the term “dining boom”, following on from the mining boom that has kept the nation relatively prosperous through the global economic crises of recent years. Government strategists, industry and researchers are set on making the country Asia’s “food bowl”, and Sukkarieh’s work is emblematic of this priority. Having undertaken robotics projects with mining multinationals like Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, Sukkarieh said automation in horticulture would be very different due to the unique nature of farm operations. “It’s all about money. Mining can afford to spend a lot of money on R&D and can afford to put expensive sensors on trucks and actually see automation work properly. “You’re talking about large-scale operations that are run by a company, whereas in agriculture – especially in the orchard industry – you’re talking about smaller holdings, smaller farms, machinery that can’t be expensive and R&D funding that is nowhere near as great as what you’d find in mining or defense. “The challenge is being able to most effectively deliver some sort of automated system given the low level of R&D with something that can be used on the farm practically, robustly and inexpensively.” As has been the case in Australia’s mining industry, Sukkarieh emphasizes there simply aren’t enough workers available. “There are two ways of getting around that – one is to increase your immigration and you dedicate certain visas to do that, or you look at automation to help you along the way. “In Australia there’s been a focus on automation. We have a proud history over the last 20 years – we have some of the largest automation projects in the world happening, and agriculture’s just going to be another one.” Australian researchers develop intelligent ‘Ladybird’ farm robot July 3rd, 2014 Researchers from the University of Sydney have developed a prototype robot that aims to advance agriculture robotics technology and provide new and important information to growers. The robot, dubbed ‘Ladybird’ due its spotty red and black appearance, comes from a collaboration with Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL) and Ausveg, and is capable of driving around the farm and conducting autonomous tasks. ladybird (1) Research fellow at the university’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) Dr. James Underwood told freshfruitportal a big advantage of the robot was the fact it did not just observe the crops, but could also take action when needed. “We have a combination of different sensors on the new Ladybird robot platform – different cameras lasers and so on to map the color and also the 3D shape of the entire farm really down to the resolution of every individual leaf,” Underwood said. “Then in addition to that we have a robot manipulator arm on the platform so we’re not just limited to sensing information passively but we can actually start to take action on the farm which could include things like contact sensing soil probes, and sensors that need to come into contact with specific vegetables.” The arm could also remove weeds from the field after having differentiated between them and the crops, and could even be used in the future to perform autonomous harvesting. Another of the Ladybird’s biggest advantages is its ability to provide farmers with key data about plant malnutrition, before a farmer would have normally realized there was an issue to be addressed. “Nitrate deficiency can be detected by growers using their own eyes because when it occurs it causes the leave of spinach, for example, to turn yellow,” Underwood said. “But once that’s occurred to the extent that it’s detectable by the human eye it’s essentially already too late – that particular crop can’t be sold and it can’t be fixed for that crop. “If it were possible to use a senor to pick up on the subtle color changes a couple weeks earlier then that would be a significant benefit because that would be early enough for the farmers to address the nitrate deficiency problem with fertigation.” He added that often when farmers see a crop has turned yellow, while it is too late for that one they will often apply the corrective measures to surrounding crops in their field on the assumption that the same problem exists for all of them, which can be expensive if there is in fact no problem. The sensors on the robot include lasers, cameras, and hyper spectra cameras, and has successfully completed tests at an Australian farm in Cowra. It has been in development for around a year with a total cost of about AUD$1 million (US$944,000). Underwood explained that due to the high cost it would be far too expensive to be economically viable as it is, but the team essentially wanted to test out all the sensors on this one prototype as a basis for further research. “One of the purposes of the research that we’re conducting here is we’ve built this robot that has more sensors that we think are probably likely to be necessary in the final solution, and part of our job as researchers is to figure out what is the lowest common denominator,” he said. “‘How cheaply can we actually detect the things we need to detect in the field? Which combination of sensors is sufficient such that as a next stage commercial prototype we could put it together much more cheaply and cost effectively?’” The researchers are also interested in systems research, and don’t necessarily see the solution as being one single vehicle, but rather the most cost effective solution may end up as a combination of different types of platforms. “For example, a small unmanned aircraft vehicle like a small helicopter or lightweight aircraft could fly around and survey from a relatively low altitude and could automatically feed that data back to other agents within this system,” Underwood said. “So having done a survey, a plane could send back the results of that survey and send a ground vehicle, perhaps, to a couple of specific regions of interest. “As a result, that ground vehicle may be cheaper if the vehicle had to cover the entire farm every day” An important part of the research is to figure out where that ‘optimal point’ lay in terms of system configuration. “At the end of the day it’s about getting the right sensor to the right position in the field at the right time, and then having the algorhythms and the software and the math behind it that can process that data into original information for farmers to actually make use of,” he said. Underwood also said he thought it more likely that in the short-term agriculture technology startup companies would buy these robots and sell their services to farmers, rather than the farmers owning the robots themselves. “I think in the longer term that’s feasible having the farmer having it in the shed and the robot just does its thing. But I think in the shorter term it’s much more likely that it will be that other model where a secondary company operates it,” he said. Along with the Ladybird, ACFR also has a variety of other robotic systems including hovering platforms that are equipped with cameras and able to fly very close to the ground, and an unmanned ariel vehicle called the J3 Club
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 19:31:25 +0000
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