The road from blue-skies robotics research to contract manufacturing.
You can book for in-person attendance at Bookwhen, where you will also find the link for Zoom viewing.
Horticulture, and in particular the production of soft fruit for fresh consumption, is heavily reliant on imported manual labour. This drives up costs and uncertainty for the growers. Fieldwork Robotics Ltd has developed a modular and autonomous raspberry harvesting robot, and is now planning commercial manufacturing of their latest iteration.
The company was spun-out from the University of Plymouth in 2016, based on the RD&I activity of Dr. Martin F. Stoelen on soft and modular robots for horticulture. Their robots have been undergoing commercial trials in Odemira, Portugal, and in spring 2022 sold the first raspberries for fresh consumption picked autonomously. Fieldwork Robotics Ltd has its main office in Cambridge, UK, and are currently expanding operations to other countries and continents.
The talk will outline the need for this type of robots, and the current state-of-the-art. It will also explore the timeline of, the different systems involved in, and the collaborations underpinning Fieldwork Robotics’ raspberry harvesting solution.
Professor Martin Fodstad Stølen, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences/Fieldwork Robotics Ltd.
Dr Martin F. Stoelen is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of Fieldwork Robotics Ltd. The company was setup in 2016 based on his research on robust and selective robotic systems for harvesting in horticulture at the University of Plymouth, UK. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, which collaborates with the company. He has extensive experience in robotics RD&I from the US, Spain, UK and Norway, and has won projects worth more than £4 million. He has a PhD and three Master´s degrees across aerospace, electronics and robotics, and was named among Codex World’s Top 50 Innovators in 2022. He is a former Fulbright Scholarship recipient, a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow, and has authored more than 40 papers in journals and conference proceedings across soft, adaptive and human-friendly robots for applications in space, healthcare and agriculture.
Attending lectures
The lecture will be preceded by a short presentation from a CSAR PhD Award Winner.
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Full video
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