Agri-Food Robotics

University of Lincoln

Intelligent Robots for Fresh Fruit Harvesting

Harvesting fruit crops is physically and mentally demanding, but robots can assist pickers to make crop production more sustainable by helping with physical tasks such as transporting picked crop to local storage facilities. With humans at the centre, we will demonstrate how fleets of robots can help multiple fruit pickers all working in parallel in a field environment. Intelligent robots can also help with decision making by automated and frequent monitoring of crop status (e.g., its maturity). This information aids agronomists in prescribing specific crop treatment or in forecasting future yield leading to more optimal and sustainable crop production.




Meet the Team

We are a cross-disciplinary research group specialising in technologies for perception, learning, decision-making, control and interaction in autonomous systems. We target the integration of these capabilities in application domains including agri-food, healthcare, intelligent transportation, logistics, nuclear robotics, service robotics, and space robotics. Our joint facilities include dedicated robotics research labs, a demonstration farm, an experimental food factory, a fleet of diverse mobile and social robots, advanced compliant robotic manipulators, a swarm of microrobots, and state-of-the-art agricultural robots. Our objective is to work on technologies for enhancing the quality of life, our health, wellbeing and the food we eat.