The UK soft fruit industry employs about 30.000 seasonal workers. Most of these are migrant workers who stay during planting and harvesting season. Labour supply in the UK is already suffering due to Brexit, and this will get drastically worse with restrictions on mobility of workers due to COVID-19\. Growers are finding it extremely hard to get the necessary number of workers to be able to keep production at normal levels. Shortage of workers will put the entire soft fruit industry at risk. With COVID-19, this problem has become more imminent and has significantly increased the need for quick solutions. Robotic harvesters are seen as one of the most promising solutions, but it has taken a lot of effort to develop these, and they are still not market ready. To speed up the launch of this robot, this project proposes to provide an early version of this system to growers in smaller numbers this season and in larger number for the next season. The system will only pick single strawberries, and not berries in clusters, which accounts for 30-70% of the berries depending on the variety.This will mitigate some of the lack of migrant workers for strawberry growers over the next couple of years.

We estimate that the UK soft fruit sector employs over 35,000 fruit pickers each day. The roles are low skilled and the sector has a high reliance on EU migrants to fill these posts. The impact of Brexit, plus labour inflation through the national living wage legislation poses a serious and direct threat to the whole sector. The need to drive productivity in the sector is urgent. Of the picking costs we estimate that 30% are for the pickers to simply carry picked fruit from within a greenhouse to an on farm logistics hub. We aim to eliminate or dramatically reduce this cost by developing an autonomous robot which can find a picker and transport picked fruit and empty trays around a farm. The robot will be autonomous, have the capacity to map its environment and to find and safely interact with a picker. The key innovation will be the development of autonomous systems which can work safely and over long periods of time in a complex farm environment. The need to drive productivity in the agri-food sector is a global challenge. This project will directly stimulate new markets and supply chains in the production of advanced autonomous systems to support agricultural producers.

Uncertainty over access to seasonal migrant labour is placing the otherwise vibrant UK fresh produce and soft fruit sector under unprecedented pressure. The immediate impacts of Brexit and COVID-19 have and are restricting availability to the 69,000 seasonal migrant workers who travel to the UK each year to harvest over £1bn of fresh fruit and vegetables. Robotics and automation technology offers a permanent solution that can disconnect the sector from it's labour dependency, whilst also creating high skilled jobs and growth for the UK robotics sector. However, critical challenges remain to develop robotic technology that can pick fruit within dense, occluded and biologically variable clusters. Leading robotic fruit picking technology can pick 80% of strawberries at 4 seconds per berry. FASTPICK will develop active vision systems integrated to a novel robotic picking head and private 5G network that aims to pick 95% of fruit at c. 2 seconds per berry, the same performance of human harvesters. This performance removes the final technical barrier to large scale adoption of agri-robotic systems for the soft fruit sector. FASTPICK will develop a state of the art active and dynamic vision system that uses multiple cameras, including visual servoing in the picking head to create a 3D scene of complex clusters and identify critical picking points for the gripper. FASTPICK will be implemented in a Gazebo digital twin environment that can be used to optimise picking control and as a key tool for future robotic development. High speed image processing will be optimised by integrating the system into cloud and mobile edge compute via a private 5G network. An optimised picking head and active vision system will be integrated onto the fully autonomous Thorvald robotic platform developed by Saga in collaboration with the University of Lincoln. It will be tested and demonstrated on semi-commercial crops of strawberries. The collaboration is led by Saga Robotics Ltd in collaboration with the University of LIncoln (UoL) and leading robotic system developers Cambridge Consultants. The picking solution will be co-created with Berry Garden Growers whose cooperative members produce over 45% of the UK's soft fruit. Co-creation enables effective and responsible innovation whilst also underpinning significant, rapid and scaled routes to market for Saga. The technology will be marketed to the UK and global fresh produce sectors but secondary markets exist across multiple robotic application domains.

Uncertainty over access to seasonal migrant labour is placing the otherwise vibrant UK fresh produce and soft fruit production under unprecedented pressure. The immediate impacts of Brexit and COVID-19 have and are restricting availability to the 69,000 seasonal migrant workers who travel to the UK each year to harvest over £1bn of fruit and vegetables. Robotics and automation technology offers a permanent solution that can disconnect the sector from its labour dependency, whilst also creating high skilled jobs and growth for the UK robotics sector. However, critical challenges remain to develop robotic technology that can be scaled in such a way that it will have a significant impact on the industry. This will require thousands of robots to be deployed over the next few years to perform a wide variety of tasks such as picking, plant protection, inspection, etc. Currently, no agricultural robotics companies are able to scale their robot deployment at a speed that will have a significant impact on the industry within the next couple of years. Robots have proven their potential in agriculture by delivering spraying, mechanical and precision weeding, UV treatment and many other services as a commercial service to growers. The number of robots operating at a commercial scale in open fields globally is very low (not currently anticipated to be more than a few thousand). There is a need for a few very specific technological advances and operational changes before we are in a position to scale this globally. This project will develop the fundamental and underpinning technology that will take us from deploying a few robots to selected growers to a position where we deploy hundreds of robots delivering commercial services at a wider scale across the UK by 2024\. Our project synthesises and demonstrates the outputs of multiple Innovate UK funded research and innovation projects. It represents the last step towards full large-scale deployment of agricultural robots in soft fruit production. While previous projects have developed technology that underpin the services that Saga Robotics are currently providing to commercial customers today at a small scale (~30 robots), this project will focus on developing fundamental technology needed to scale agricultural robots in the UK. The identified technological gaps are related to efficient and cost-effective deployment and operation of robots in the open field without the need for constant supervision by humans.

"The UK soft fruit market is now worth well over £1.3 billion at retail sales values (Source: Kantar) per annum. The UK grows over 160,000 tonnes of fruit and employs 32,000 seasonal and, typically, migrant pickers. Approximately 50% of the total production cost is for labour. The soft fruit industry is extremely concerned with the both the availability of picking and husbandry labour and labour cost inflation. The impact of Brexit is already affecting labour supply and the opportunities to pass on labour cost inflation are weak and challenging. The soft fruit sector is a UK success story and there are still opportunities for expansion and to reduce fruit imports. However, it is very clear that to thrive the industry needs to drive every possible means to improve to labour productivity. Robots for soft fruit production clearly offers great opportunity in the sector. Here we will develop the world's first fleet of multi-modal robots that can carry out a wide variety of tasks in the field. Strawberry production is a complex task, and several different tasks need to be performed throughout the season. This is the first project that reflects this, in that we aim to develop robots that are completely autonomous that can carry out several different tasks in the field. We will build on current research by Saga Robotics, Berry Gardens and the University of Lincoln (UoL), complimenting the team for the first time with the inclusion of the University of Oxford and NIAB. Saga have already demonstrated world leading picking performance (in terms of vision system accuracy and picking speed) for their fruit picking robot. The system will then be integrated into the world leading Thorvald robotic platform that has been developed by Saga with UoL. In addition, we will develop a wide range of other tools that will be integrated with the robots. The robots will autonomously pick up the tools from a tool changer, and they will also charge and dock autonomously. This is a much-needed project that will transform robotic strawberry production from the laboratory bench to a commercially relevant system. The world-wide market for these machines and IP is very significant."