0.015 sec recognition
7.5 seconds to harvest
10 minutes a tree
......
The high-tech scenes seen in the documentary are now illuminated by reality
In November 2022, the two-arm apple picking robot of the Apple Full Mechanization Scientific Research Base (Shaanxi Baishui Apple Experimental Station) was unveiled at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. It is understood that the robot only takes 0.015 seconds to identify the location of the apple on the tree, to achieve "small grip, stable grasp, and picking", the average picking speed of single-arm single fruit is about 7.5 seconds / piece, and two-arm picking can pick about 800 fruits per hour, equivalent to 6 to 7 fruit trees, about 10 minutes for a tree. In the future, this apple two-arm picking robot can even pick day and night, realizing unmanned autonomous intelligent operation.
What is the essence of mechanization? Alternative to simple labor; What is the essence of intelligence? Replace complex labor. Tie Ding, director of the Agricultural Research Center of Yuanyi Think Tank and editor-in-chief of the Agricultural Ginseng, believes that improving efficiency and reducing costs is the state to be achieved by brand building. Brand agriculture must have cost awareness and take cost (price) management as an important topic to do, including planting and breeding costs, warehousing and logistics costs, management operating costs, human resource costs, etc. From traditional production to mechanized production, from extensive operation to refined management, this is the inevitable trend and requirement of agricultural development.
This year, the Central Document No. 1 proposed to accelerate the research and development and promotion of advanced agricultural machinery, step up the research and development of large-scale intelligent agricultural machinery equipment, hilly and mountainous areas suitable for small machinery and horticultural machinery.
The successful trial of this apple two-arm picking robot also means that the mechanization of apple picking in mainland China has taken an important step forward.
Why do we need picking robots?
Robotic harvesting is one of the keys to the modernization of agriculture and forestry. Picking is the most time-consuming and labor-intensive link in the fruit production chain, and the cost of hiring picking workers accounts for 50%~70% of the operating costs of fruit farmers. Especially in developed countries, agricultural development is facing the risk of serious aging of the population, lack of agricultural labor, and the cost of hiring agricultural workers is gradually increasing, picking robots will be the best alternative.
According to the "14th Five-Year Plan" data, the comprehensive mechanization rate of crop cultivation and harvest in the country has reached 71.25%, while the comprehensive mechanization rate of crop cultivation and harvest in hilly and mountainous areas is less than 50%, which is about 20% lower than the national average. Although the mainland is a developing country, it has shown the phenomenon of aging population, hollow villages and wasteland turning farmland, and the shortage of rural labor and the high cost of labor have become stumbling blocks for peasant households. At the same time, the continent is large and bountiful, the terrain and geomorphology are complex and diverse, and the cost of artificial planting remains high.
Taking apples as an example, in the apple planting areas in the northwest, southwest and southeast regions of the mainland, there are mostly hills and ravines, ruggedness, and fragmentation of planting, and apple picking and transportation are difficult.
The use of large-scale smart agricultural machinery will reduce the time cost of apple harvesting and mountain transportation, as well as the cost of transportation damage. Improve farmers' enthusiasm for production and planting, help the revitalization of rural industries, and accelerate the rapid development of agricultural modernization.
The foreign practice of mechanization and intelligence
Looking at the world, in the 80s of the 20th century, the United States, Japan, and Germany began to study picking robots. After years of development, the picking robots on the market mainly include strawberry harvesting robots, tomato harvesting robots, cucumber harvesting robots, apple harvesting robots and forestry harvesting robots.
Washington State, the famous "fruit country", is a world-class famous apple export base, Washington apples are famous all over the world. Some orchards use smart apple robots for harvesting. Their picking robot is composed of 6 picking arms, picking 30 apples in 1 minute, from one apple recognition to picking in only 1.5 seconds; combined with satellite navigation combined with visual analysis, it can accurately identify ripe apples on the tree, and then use vacuum suction to pick them around the clock.
However, robots and the planting environment are mutually reinforcing.
In order for the picking robot to carry out large-scale mechanized harvesting operations, they specially changed the original three-dimensional apple tree growth space to two-dimensional plane planting, and developed a dwarf self-rooted anvil belt branching large seedlings suitable for picking robots to shuttle through the field to build gardens, and the high spindle shape is the main tree shape. The branches of the apple tree no longer stretch out around, but the branches are functionally classified and built, and in the planting row spacing, the computer intelligent control, GPS coordinates positioning, the tractor automatically planting the row spacing is 4 meters, and each row of fruit trees is arranged in a straight line.
The market for smart picking robots is huge, and in fruit picking, time is everything, and a delay of one or two weeks will cause fruit to lose 80% of its value, and fruit growers around the world lose $30 billion in sales due to inability to pick every year. Therefore, intelligent picking robots are one of the important agricultural tools in countries around the world.
In October 2021, Japan's Inaho tomato harvesting robot fully automated to pick snack tomatoes, AI algorithms identify ripeness according to fruit color and size, pick a tomato in an average of 6 seconds, and can be used for 12 hours on a single charge, working day and night. The Spanish citrus picking robot picks 60 citrus oranges per minute, while the manual can only pick about 8, and the work speed is extremely fast.
In the same year, at the Dutch International Horticultural Exhibition (GreenTech), Prima launched Kompano, a leaf-picking robot that can move independently in the greenhouse, which can pick the leaves of tomato plants around the clock. Powered by smart algorithms and patented end-effectors, the robot operates on an area of 1 hectare per week with an accuracy rate of over 85%. The first robots have already been delivered to growers.
New Zealand, Robotics Plus's kiwi automatic picker, 4 machine picking arms can ripe the kiwi from the fruit rack and then transfer it to the collection box.
Speaking of many kinds of picking robots, although the picking robots listed above have been successfully tested, they are either produced on a small scale or have no market. Especially in the case of inconsistent planting standardization in various countries, there is still a long way to go before picking robots are commercialized and sold to the market.
Mechanization forces standardized agricultural planting
Good horse with good saddle. The mainland hilly areas mainly carry large fruits and vegetables and other cash crops, and are the "fruit basket" of the mainland, and accelerating the independent research and development of bulk fruit picking robots suitable for the mainland hilly areas is crucial to the mainland's realization of agricultural modernization.
It is understood that a raspberry picking robot in the UK costs 700,000 pounds (equivalent to about 6.14 million yuan). Smart agricultural machinery is expensive, and it is not a farm machine that small farmers can buy casually. To improve the large-scale use of intelligent agricultural machinery, the mainland's "small and scattered" farmland planting mode should be closer to large-scale planting, standardized management, and mechanized production.
Tie Ding, director of the Agricultural Research Center of Yuanyi Think Tank and editor-in-chief of the Agricultural Staff, believes that the quality of the scattered production of small farmers is not uniform, and it is difficult to meet the requirements of the brand. Brand building itself has a large capital investment, a long payback period, and a high capacity threshold, making it difficult for small farmers to participate. Improving quality through mechanized and standardized production can create conditions for the development of brand agriculture and accelerate the efficient docking of small farmers with large markets.
Taking apple cultivation as an example: according to the climate, soil and other natural environments of each region, apple varieties, seedlings, etc. can be selected, and in accordance with the principle of "adapting measures to local conditions, suitable for trees and planting", integrate small farmers into large farms, and then build standardized orchards suitable for agricultural machinery operations according to the needs of modern and mechanized production. Through modern agricultural production methods, we force orchards to build standardized planting. As mentioned earlier, the United States has penetrated high technology into every corner of the apple orchard.
Investment and financing continue to accelerate the landing of robot products
Technology is the primary productive force. In recent years, under the condition that the national economy and science and technology have achieved rapid development, intelligent robots have been widely used in many fields. Scientific research teams and enterprises from domestic and foreign universities actively invest in the cooperation, research and development and promotion of agricultural robots.
In 2018, DJI Technology received a strategic investment of 1 billion US dollars, and from 2020 to 2021, XAG received a total investment of 1.5 billion yuan from Baidu Capital, SoftBank Vision, Innovation Factory, Hillhouse Capital, etc., and the rising stars in the field of unmanned aircraft, Suzhou Polar and Nanjing Tuojiang, also obtained hundreds of millions of yuan in financing, in addition, Beidou automatic navigation and intelligent agricultural machinery enterprises such as Fengjiang Intelligence, Shanghai Lianshi and Huida Technology have also received various amounts of investment and financing.
In the past three years, the agricultural consumer market with broad space has also attracted Internet giants and industrial leaders to continue to increase their weight. In 2022, the agricultural unmanned driving enterprise "Zhongke Driving Power" completed tens of millions of A+ round financing. This round of financing is led by Genesis partner CCV, and co-invested by old shareholders Vertex Investment and Delian Capital, which will be mainly used for product research and development and market expansion. The Internet industry has also entered the market, Pinduoduo announced the establishment of a special agricultural science and technology project of 10 billion yuan, Tencent safely released a strategic new product "Tencent Anxin Platform", JD.com landed "agricultural products large-scale circulation strategy" and so on.
Financing is the leapfrog development of agricultural capital enterprises from commodity management to capital competition, in addition to the above enterprises, at present, typical agricultural machinery manufacturers such as Ward, WM, and Starlight have also accelerated the target of listing qualifications on the ChiNext Board, Science and Technology Innovation Board, and the listing qualification. The development of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and smart agriculture in mainland China is strong and powerful.
Practical but significant
In recent years, Continental has made many achievements in the research of large-scale intelligent agricultural machinery equipment.
Taking DJI Agriculture as an example, China-made plant protection drones lead the world, with a global market share of more than 70%, and DJI and XAG unmanned aircraft fully occupy Japan and South Korea.
Chinese rice bowl should be firmly in your hands. The development of agricultural mechanization has realized one-person multi-machine management, continuous high-intensity and long-term operation, and greatly reduced the number of operators.
The mainland's mechanized production of grain crops in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Northeast China and other places has been widely used. However, bulk fruits are affected by the natural environment and are weaker than the mechanized production management of food crops. Orchard planting should achieve comprehensive mechanized production, on the one hand, it is necessary to accelerate large-scale planting, on the other hand, according to the degree of development of modern agricultural mechanization, orchards are forced to implement the construction of standardized orchards and management methods from the aspects of cultivation, land preparation, fertilization, spraying, harvesting, etc., so as to promote large-scale intelligent agricultural machinery to operate as soon as possible.
With the two-armed apple picking robot as one of the representatives, it is believed that in the future, mainland agriculture will change the past loess facing the sky back to the sky, to achieve robot farming, one person to manage thousands of acres of farmland.
Resources:
[1] Farmer's Daily: ChatGPT is out of the circle, and the apple picking robot is like this
[2] Geek Park: In 2050, we need 5 million "robots" to pick fruit
[3] 678Robot: Everything is Pickable! Picking robots are so widely used in agriculture?!
[4] Intuitive learning machinery: 50 acres of orchards 1 machine 6 hands, day and night operation, picking apples in less than 1 second
[5] 35 dou: Agricultural machinery companies are also lining up for IPOs, and the industry has ushered in a second wave of capital
[6] Xishan National Agricultural Park: Agriculture | Inventory of 6 foreign agricultural robots! Cool and practical!