Tomato harvesting robot after upgrade ‘eight times faster’
Robot developer inaho Europe has developed a new version of its tomato harvesting robot. The robot is therefore ‘eight times faster’, claims the subsidiary of the originally Japanese company. The robot now harvests more than 12 kilograms of snack tomatoes per hour.
Inaho Europe is working with Dutch growers Nick Duijvestijn from Kwekerij Duijvestijn and Ferry Adegeest from TVA Growers to accelerate the development of the autonomous tomato harvesting robot. The company continues to test the latest version of the autonomous tomato harvesting robot in the greenhouses of the two Dutch tomato growers to verify economic feasibility and further improve performance.
The robot is faster due to the addition of the ‘cluster harvesting’ option. This option replaces the separate harvesting of the tomatoes. Inaho is committed to developing a concept with multiple robots for an ‘affordable price’.
Improved harvesting speed
By harvesting a cluster of several tomatoes at once, the harvesting speed (kg/h) has increased. This new, patent-pending technology enables a significant increase in productivity by reducing the time it takes to harvest a large number of tomatoes.
Lower costs
In the previous version, where the robot arm harvested one fruit at a time, it was difficult to achieve competitive costs compared to manual labor, a dilemma for robot builders. However, with the implementation of cluster harvesting, there is now the prospect of a more cost-competitive solution that approaches the cost of human labor, the robot builders said.
