Many German farming businesses are currently facing immense challenges. The use of fertilizers is to be reduced while at the same time, there is a flagrant lack of manpower. For these companies to be able to live off their earnings in future, work processes must be set up more digitally and, where possible, also be automated. This is the only way to be more efficient, flexible, and more predictable and thus to increase productivity.
A team of engineers at IAV has taken these challenges as an opportunity to develop a harvesting robot geared to current market needs in a pioneering project with large farms.
“Germany, with its deep technical understanding as well as its development and manufacturing depth is tailor-made for a high-level technology like advanced AI robotics,” says Enrico Neumann, product manager at IAV.
Currently, the robot is specifically trained on picking strawberries, but in future it can also be trained to pick other target crops.
How the robot works
The robot moves autonomously through the planting aisles with the elevated planting troughs. The robot’s arm, equipped with a camera and a patented gripping system, uses cloud computing and artificial intelligence to locate the strawberries, determine their degree of ripeness and place the ripe fruit safely in a basket after separating the strawberry from the plant by the stem.
The robot has already successfully completed this process 3.5 million times in so-called endurance tests in the field. What is particularly practical: The system can also operate at night, around 20 hours of picking without a break are possible with the robot.
With more than 7,600 employees, IAV is one of the world’s leading engineering partners for the automotive industry. The company has been developing innovative concepts and technologies for future vehicles for more than 35 years and generated sales of approximately 863 million euros in 2021. Its customers include all major automobile manufacturers and suppliers worldwide. Besides vehicle and powertrain development, IAV already entered electric mobility and autonomous driving at an early stage and today is one of the leading development service providers in these areas. In addition to development centers in Berlin, Gifhorn and Chemnitz/Stollberg, IAV has other German locations in Munich, Sindelfingen and Ingolstadt, as well as in Europe, Asia, North and South America.