Robot taught, carefully remove the upper leaves from head of lettuce
Engineers from Cambridge University have unveiled a robot that can gently clean the head of lettuce from the outer leaves.
Upstairs
The whole process took 27 seconds, according to the website of the University.
Due to constant increasing demand for agricultural products the developers coming up with various ways of automating the various associated with this field processes. Company DJI, for example, for several years, develops agricultural drones, and last year the robots in the experiment managed to plant a hectare of land and collect the harvest, and almost without human intervention.
Technological assistance may be required in the preparation of products for consumption or sale: for example, usually after harvesting of lettuce (one type of which is called iceberg) lettuce from manually separated the top the withered leaves.
Build a robot that would be able to handle this task automatically decided British engineers under the leadership of Luke Kimery (Luca Scimera).
The robot consists of two parts. The first is the camera, which with the help of computer vision algorithms, trained on hundreds of pictures of heads of lettuce, examines vegetable and is looking for his head, based on which defines its position in space, and then flips a head. The second part consists of a managed hand-pump, which separates the upper leaves. The whole process, as reported by the developers, takes a little less than half a minute. The pump operates very accurately and does not destroy the fresh lettuce.
The engineers said that the use of the constructed robot can be for other cultures: it is necessary to train the computer vision system on the corresponding sample.
Sometimes robots and drones find not very obvious work connected with food. For example, in our article you can read about enthusiasts who turned the quadcopter in blender.