The shortage of harvesting workers is felt in many parts of the world and causes a significant loss of agricultural yield. Beyond the economic damage to farmers and the global waste of resources, this is also damage to food security in the world. One of the solutions to the problem is in the world of robotics.
Professor Hever Amir Degani, from the Environmental, Water and Agricultural Engineering Unit in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion, is leading a study dealing with the development of a mobile ground robot that knows how to use a drone or a small number of drones whose purpose is to perform all plantation operations in a much more precise and economical way.
The combination between the two was born out of the robot’s difficulty in locating the plantation’s surroundings from its ground point of view alongside the advantage of the drone having a low aerial point of view which will help identify the plantation’s surroundings, fruits ripe for picking and locating pests for the robot.
Prof. Degani’s research is in its infancy and this is another direction in the development of robotics-based agriculture that will adapt itself to fully robotic picking, from the picking operation to the structure of the plantation itself.
