CSB - Ben McGuinness - Robots

Three high-tech horticultural robots made their appearance at this year's National Fieldays at Mystery Creek. We find out about what they are all about. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well on the country Sport Breakfast at Field Days. I've
come across the University of Waikato at the Innovation Hub.
Now this innovation hub has blown me away number one.
Some of the innovation in there is incredible. Way Keta University.
Have got Ben McGinnis with me at the moment from
Wayketta University. I don't know where to start with what
you've got here on display, So let's start with this

(00:22):
big machine.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Ben tell us about it all right.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
This big machine is an automatic grapevine prunter. So what
it can do is it's a big vehicle that straddles
the grapevine. It'll drive autonomously down the rows, identify individual
grape vines, stop at them, build up three D models,
make decisions about where to prune, and then do the pruning.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
How long have you had this how long you've been
developing it?

Speaker 3 (00:46):
This is part of a five year MBIE funded project,
so it's in its fifth year at the moment. It's
actually a collaboration between a bunch of institutions, So the
contract holder is the University of Auckland and then Yes University,
Wayketo University, Canerary, Lincoln Agritech University of Otaga and Planting
Food Research.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
We're looking at an arm there with some clippers on
the end. Yes you are.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
So we have a robot arm that straddles well, that's
either side of the vine. On that robot arm are
cameras so we can move around the robot arm and
get heaps of different views of the vines, build up
three D models, and then we've got some prenum mechanisms
to make the cuts.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Is it being used in any vineyards at the moment.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
We're doing field trials which are coming up later this month,
but you won't find any of these vehicles or robots
out there doing this stuff commercially yet. So we've kind
of proved its technical feasibility and then the next steps
will be optimizing it, make it faster, make it cheaper,
because these things need to be commercially viable if they're

(01:49):
going to be useful.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
All right, that's something for the grape growers inside. This
one's outside because it's quite big, but inside, what else.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Have you got?

Speaker 3 (01:57):
So we've got some other solutions for horticulture, and so
this one's a fully autonomous solution. But these yeah, they're
still a little bit away from being commercially viable. So
inside we've got some human assist solutions, so hand hold
mechatronic devices to make blueberry harvesting easier. So you can

(02:17):
imagine if you're harvesting blueberries, it's the middle of summer,
really hot. The berries grow right from the ground up
to your chest height, so you're constantly crouching and constantly
moving around. It's it's pretty hard work.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yeah. So we've got a handheld device which latches onto
the branches and shakes the berries and it's kind of
tuned that only the right berries will fall off and
leave the unripe ones behind, and it's designed in such
a way that there's less reaching so it can be
easier on people. So by making it easier for people,

(02:52):
we're hoping to, I guess, open up the demographic and
have a wider pool of people that we could potentially
employ to do this work.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
It's interesting. That been amazing.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yes, we've got some interest, so we're working with a
bunch of growers and companies like Berry Co. So you're
so far showing promise and then yeah, we'll look at
making a few pre commercial prototypes hopefully that they could
test fully.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
So you guys have all been working really hard behind
the scenes way at University of Wikauto.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah, University of Wakato amongst the other partners that I
mentioned earlier. Yeah, and also inside we've also got some
low cost navigation systems, so instead of relying on expensive GPS,
it's a vision based system that will detect markers to
locate the robot, because yeah, like I said, for these

(03:44):
things to be useful, they really have to get cheaper
as well.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Yeah, absolutely pretty amazing and this is incredible, So thank
you for joining us.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Oh, thank you