News
Sweet pepper harvesting robot project SWEEPER close to the finish line
After a very successful first live demonstration of the developed SWEEPER pepper harvesting robot in the greenhouse of "De Tuindershoek" in IJsselmuiden (Netherlands) on 4th of July 2018 and a demonstration to the visitors of the Agricultural Engineering Conference EurAgEng2018 in Wageningen on 9th and 10th of July, more public events are scheduled during the remaining last 3 months of the project.
For example, on September 12th 2018, the next SWEEPER demonstration will take place at the Research Station for Vegetable Growing, PSKW, in St. Katelijne Waver in Belgium. More information and the registration can be found on the SWEEPER website. From October 1-5, 2018 the SWEEPER robot will be exhibited at one of the leading scientific robotics conferences IROS2018 (International Conference in Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Madrid.
The scientific article "Design of an eye-in-hand sensing and servo control framework for harvesting robotics in dense vegetation", written by the WUR authors Ruud Barth, Jochen Hemming and Eldert van Henten, published in Biosystems Engineering Journal (146 (2016) 71 -84) has recently obtained the "EurAgEng Outstanding Paper Award 2018". This article is based on results achieved in the SWEEPER project. It describes a modular software framework design that allows flexible implementation of eye-in-hand sensing and motion control for agricultural robotics in dense vegetation.
Since its release two months ago the video clip of the SWEEPER robot was already downloaded more than 25000 times. Watch the video on the SWEEPER website or YouTube.
SWEEPER is a partnership between Wageningen University & Research (co-ordination), pepper grower De Tuindershoek BV, both in the Netherlands, Umea University in Sweden, Ben-Gurion University in Israel and the Research Station for Vegetable Cultivation and Bogaerts Greenhouse Logistics from Belgium. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644313.