Vegebot Is A Machine-Learning Robot That Harvests Lettuce Autonomously

UK-based Cambridge University’s researchers have created a robot for picking up vegetables and they have put it for field test through harvesting iceberg lettuce.

Over the years in the farming field, agricultural harvesting has experienced certain development but never with iceberg lettuce.

It’s fairly easy to mechanically harvest many crops. And machines have been giving a helping hand in the harvest of sturdier produce like wheat and potatoes. However, the iceberg lettuce has soft leaves as well as low-lying profile, so it is extremely hard to make a harvesting machine that can assist or replace human for this vegetable.

The researchers got their findings published in The Journal of Field Robotics.

The Vegebot and lettuce

Dubbed “Vegebot”, the robot can autonomously detect and harvest iceberg lettuce thanks to the work of the research team.

Through the collaboration with local vegetable and fruit co-operative G’s Growers, the researchers have successfully tested the Vegebot in the field. Until earlier this month, the robot was operating in the laboratory only. According to Simon Birrell, researcher’s co-author, Engineering department at Cambridge University:

How Vegebot works

First, using its computer vision system, the autonomous robot identifies the iceberg lettuce.

Then, it determines if the crop is ready for harvesting or not. If the target is ready, Vegebot will chop off the lettuce from the rest of the plant with is cutting system while making sure it is good enough for sale.

Although the prototype is still too slow compared with human work, it’s still a big leap for robotics in the field of harvesting that we now have a robot capable of detecting qualified lettuce for harvesting and pulling them out of the ground.

The team made sure they built a robot that is adjustable to suit other crops too.

Iida, the head of the research tea, said that the team aimed to work on approaches not necessarily specific to that kind of lettuce so they can help with other kinds of crops grown above the ground.

The future of Vegebot

Thanks to the contribution of robotic harvesters, we can solve problems of manual labor shortages and reduce food wastage. Josie Hughes, the study’s co-author said that they are gathering data on lettuce to improve efficiency like which fields will result in the highest yields.

However, the next vital task for the team is to make Vegebot work at least as fast as humans.