Agritech: Autonomous robot for grapes harvesting

Vineyarding is one of the most relevant fields for Italian and European agriculture, and it is a field where most of the activities are necessary carried on manually. Among the various activities that must be carried on, grape harvesting is the most difficult to mechanize.

There are grape harvester machines based on shaking the whole vine row, but the machines used are very big and difficult to maneuver in small area, they are expensive, and they damage the plants.

The goal of this activity is therefore the creation of an autonomous robot for grape harvesting that mimics the manual harvesting.

Particular effort is placed on the effective design of the robotic hand and the algorithms required to recognize the grapes and, most importantly, the points where to cut it. This is a task that is difficult to do even for the human mind, in a real situation, so the development of the machine learning algorithms is particularly challenging, and it is the most important goal of this project.

Erc Sector:

  • PE7_1 Control engineering
  • PE7_10 Robotics

Keywords:

  • Agricultural engineering
  • Service robots Agriculture 4.0
  • Machine LEarning

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