Development of a robotic asparagus harvester (for mechanical, selective harvesting)

Robotic harvesting offers an attractive potential solution to reducing labour costs while enabling more regular and selective harvesting, optimising crop quality and therefore profit. These potential benefits have spurred research in the use of agricultural robots (AgBots) for harvesting horticultural crops over the past 3 decades1. Yet, harvesting robots are still far from mature, and harvesting is still predominately manual due to the limited performance of current robots1. Researchers from the ANU node of the ARC Centre for Robotics Vision (ACRV) are developing a prototype robotic harvester that will be able to cope with the challenges associated with the selective harvesting of green asparagus. The harvester will be driven along (via a tractor) an asparagus dam in the field, will detect and identify spears that are ready for harvesting, and perform harvesting without damaging the spears.