Vineland Research and Innovation Centre
harvesting-robot
Vineland’s innovative robot ushers in new era of agricultural innovation.
The Vineland Research and Innovation Centre says new technologies will be critical as Canada deals with a looming shortage of farm workers.
The research facility in Niagara, Ontario, recently published its 2022/23 Innovation Report, with the top headline being the need for improved automation tools that will reduce the need for boots on the ground.
Canadian horticulture, like most other sectors in agriculture, is suffering from a growing labour shortage, the report says. Overall, an agri-food workforce shortfall is predicted to reach more than 123,000 jobs by 2029. At the same time, labour-intensive horticultural crops increase the cost of labour, often representing 40 to 60 percent of production costs for growers.”
Increases in production costs resonate with farmers throughout the country, including the fruit industry, who have seen their margins getting tighter since the COVID-19 pandemic began, thanks partly to labour shortages.
Other factors include the higher cost of fertilizers and other agricultural inputs, which can also be reduced by the use of automated spraying systems with pinpoint accuracy.
“That’s why the industry is increasingly turning to solutions to automate certain tasks, addressing the labour crunch while also boosting production efficiencies to help growers remain profitable and competitive,” says the report writers.
Vineland says greenhouse growers in particular have been quick to adopt automation for the management of their highly controlled growing environments, with computers controlling automated irrigation and fertigation systems, for example.
Automation has already made greenhouse growers far more efficient, but the industry still faces a major challenge as no one has developed an autonomous vegetable harvesting technology that’s can to rival or surpass human workers.
Developing such a system is a top priority for the automation team, which has initially been focused on creating a robotic harvesting system for long English cucumbers, but which can also be modified in future to work with other crops such as peppers.
Most Canadians are unaware that, thanks to the innovations in greenhouse technology, centres like Leamington in Ontario or the Fraser Valley in B.C. have turned the country into a major exporter of fruits and vegetables. In fact, Canada is now the world’s fourth largest cucumber exporter at over $320 million annually, and Vineland says there’s still room to grow.
Potential for growth in the greenhouse vegetable industry is significant; however, the cost and restricted availability of workers are holding the sector back.
Cucumbers are harvested by hand and growers spend approximately $27 million annually just on this labour-intensive task.”
Vineland Research and Innovation Centre
Hussam Haroun
Hussam Haroun, director of automation at Vineland, says his team is thrilled to see the development of its robotic harvesting system, which is expected to launch within the next couple of years.
“We know there are various companies working on autonomous vegetable harvesting solutions around the world, but most indicators for successful deployment are still four to five years away,” says Haroun. “At Vineland, we’ve been able to develop a platform that can be ready earlier.”
For now, Vineland’s cucumber harvesting robot remains a ‘proof-of-concept solution, but the results the team is seeing in the lab are very encouraging, Haroun says.
The robot essentially moves along the rows of cucumbers in the greenhouse, and has a vision system that allows it to identify the fruit on the vine, assess whether it’s ripe or not, and if it is, it will cut the cucumber from the vine and place it into a harvest bin.
The system has performed well in trials at Vineland’s research greenhouse and Haroun says, through further development, it could be adapted to other tasks, such as pruning or applied to other greenhouse crops like peppers, for example.
“We are now looking for one or more partners who can help develop a next stage prototype to pilot in a commercial greenhouse setting,” he says. “We are able to align or integrate our system with other companies in this space when they are ready to collaborate to bring it to market.”
That collaboration is critical to success in a field where there so many different technologies combine into a single product. For example, he says the robot’s arm was a significant design challenge that alone could take years to develop, so instead, the Vineland team worked with Kinova, a robotics company based in Quebec.
Kinova specializes in biomedical research and creating assistive prosthetic devices for humans, and it had already developed an incredibly effective robotic arm and hand that could be adapted to picking fruit in a greenhouse.
“As we began working with Kinova, we realized their expertise in robotics could also help us improve our technology and make it faster,” says Brian Lynch, senior research scientist, Field Robotics. “Working with partners in allied industries is key to adapting and introducing automation technologies into horticulture.”
The Vineland team also says that working together helped Kinova learn about the incredible potential of expanding their horizons, and doing more work in the field of horticulture. According to Haroun, that’s where Vineland can play a key role in helping companies understand the nuances of horticulture and adapt their systems to the market’s needs.
Greenhouse production in general is moving towards a more data-driven, scientific management approach and there are other horticultural crops in need of autonomous solutions. All of this combines to spell an opportunity for innovators, companies and growers, Haroun says.
“The Vineland approach to innovation, focused on partnerships and collaboration, can help bring these types of solutions to the industry.”
The cucumber robot is just one example of the innovations being developed for horticulture. Already, applied research through the program have led to the development of an automated vegetable harvester, smart greenhouse irrigation technology and robotic mushroom harvester.