Vegebot’ Will Now Help in Harvesting Your Lettuce

The scientists of Cambridge have developed a vegetable-picking robot that uses machine learning to identify and harvest a commonplace but challenging agricultural crop. It uses machine learning for its work.

Machine Learning is an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which provides systems the capacity to learn automatically and improve from experience without being programmed explicitly.

This ‘Vegebot’ was initially trained to recognize and harvest iceberg lettuce in a lab setting. According to a study published by in The Journal of Field Robotics reveals that it has been successfully tested in a variety of field cooperation with local fruit and vegetable co-operative.  

Robotics and agriculture

Harvesting iceberg lettuce is one of the most difficult jobs for the lettuce farmer. It takes lots of manual labor and hard work. Agricultural robots automate slow, time-consuming and dull tasks for farmers, allowing them to give more focus on improving overall production yields.  

Harvesting and picking are one of the most popular robotic applications in agriculture due to the accuracy and speed that robots can achieve to improve the size of yields and reduce waste from crops being left in the field. The research found that if the robotics in agriculture expanded, it will give on improving overall production yields, even for crops like iceberg lettuce which are particularly challenging to harvest mechanically.

Potatoes and wheat have been harvested mechanically at scale for decades, but many other crops have to date resisted from this technology. Iceberg lettuce is one such crop.