The Catalan company Enkitek with the technological support of Eurecat has designed a robot for monitoring fruit and vegetable crops in soilless agriculture, checking their quality and point of ripeness and harvesting them. The system adds to traditional labour operations by enhancing their productivity through the combination of various Industry 4.0 technologies such as 3D sensors and artificial intelligence in hydroponic farming, a method which does not use any soil.
The company has been backed by the Catalan Government through ACCIÓ, the Agency for Business Competitiveness in the Ministry of Business and Labour, with a €10,000 grant from the ACCIÓ Coupons for Advanced Digital Technologies which allow technologies to be tested by the Digital Innovation Hub of Catalonia (DIH4CAT). In this case, the technology provider for the project was Eurecat which leads DIH4CAT’s advanced manufacturing and robotics node.
“Automation tapping robotics and artificial intelligence is a high added-value tool for the agricultural industry because it will make it possible to step up soilless farming and tackle problems such as the lack of fertile soil and potential droughts,” says Víctor Canton Ferrer, Enkitek’s CEO. “It is a tool we hope will be used to enhance quality in the agricultural industry and society anchored in technological knowledge and research. The ACCIÓ coupon has enabled us to move forward at this early stage of the project and cleared the way for us to apply for other grants to further develop our technology.”
The robot Enkitek uses is equipped with a device which works together with a computer to run an artificial intelligence model to find the fruit, identify its state of ripeness and spot potential defects based on an RGB camera. If the produce is viable for harvesting, the robot uses a 3D stereoscopic camera to determine its location within the crop and calculate the optimum position for cutting the stalk and picking the fruit. Finally, it calculates the orders to be sent so that the robot can harvest and dispatch the fruit.
The device is designed for soilless crops and suitable for all kinds of fruit and vegetables. The company has conducted a first pilot test with a small-scale strawberry crop and the device is scalable to larger crops at the customer’s request.
Companies using this robot can optimise crop productivity while adding to the traditional labour force to increase crop yields as it can work 24 hours a day. Enkitek is looking to market the device in two main sectors: education in agriculture, targeting vocational training for students to implement new technological solutions in the agricultural industry, and companies or individual customers who would like to use this technology to raise their productivity.
