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Farm robot autonomously navigates and harvests among raised beds

Strawberry fields will forever exist for the in-demand fruit, but the laborers who do the backbreaking work of harvesting them might continue to dwindle. While raised, high-bed cultivation somewhat eases the manual labor, the need for robots to help harvest strawberries, tomatoes, and other such produce is apparent.

Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga has developed an algorithm for robots to autonomously drive in two modes: moving to a pre-designated destination and moving alongside raised cultivation beds.

The Graduate School of Engineering researcher experimented with an agricultural robot that utilizes lidar point cloud data to map the environment. The findings were in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.

Lidar, available on some high-end, pro-level smartphones and used by autonomous vehicles, uses light in laser pulses as a remote sensing method. The farming robot can thus move accurately while maintaining a constant distance from the cultivation bed, with its effectiveness verified in virtual and actual environments.

"If robots can move around the farm more precisely, the range of tasks that they can perform automatically will expand, not only for harvesting, but also for monitoring for disease and pruning," Professor Fujinaga explained.

"My research shows a possibility, and once this type of agricultural robot becomes more practical to use, it will make a significant contribution to improving work efficiency and reducing labor, especially for high-bed cultivation."