South East’s APS Produce awarded £3.8m to fund robotic crop harvesting research

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Daniel Face

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APS Produce, which operates facilities in Kent and West Sussex, has been named one of three projects to receive government funding for research and development which it hopes will boost agricultural productivity, sustainability, and climate resilience.

Run by a team at APS Produce, the Agri-Opencore project was awarded over £3.8 million to fund its work on robotic crop systems for horticulture. With the sector racked by labour shortages worldwide, there are huge opportunities to reduce both costs and labour requirements through autonomous systems.

The money is to be put towards the creation of both software and hardware for the world’s first open development platform for agri-robotic crop harvesting. This will enable multiple organisations across sectors to collaborate and demonstrate developing technologies on English farms, and is estimated to help accelerate the adoption of robot picking by two years.

Phil Pearson from APS Produce said: “The Agri-Opencore robotics project is an exciting and vital project for the fresh produce industry. It promises to deliver the significant progress required to automate fresh produce harvesting in the UK.

“As this work brings leading technology providers, Dogtooth, Xihelm, and Wootzano, with the academic excellence of the University of Lincoln team, we can expect significant progress towards autonomous harvesting.”

Agri-Opencore received funding alongside a project to develop an autonomous cow cubicle bedding unit, as well as another which explores optimised systems for potato cultivation.

Together, they represent a small part of the government’s £270 million Farming Innovation Programme. This in turn falls within its commitment to spend £600 million over three years on grants to help farmers invest in productivity, animal health and welfare, and innovation.

Katrina Hayter, Interim Executive Director for Healthy Living and Agriculture at Innovate UK, said: “These projects have all demonstrated not only an innovative solution to a real-life, on-farm problem, but also the value of partnerships and collaboration between different sector experts. For novel technology to truly succeed, it needs the input of the farmers themselves for the day-to-day realities of its use.

“We’re really pleased that these partnerships have this idea at their core, and we now look forward to working with them as they develop their solutions further and bring the benefits to life.”

Daniel Face

Born and raised in Berkshire, Dan fell into journalism after completing his bachelor’s degree in English at UCL. Writing for The Business Magazine and local Biz News sites has given him the opportunity to chat with all manner of small business owners and share their success stories with a wider audience. Outside of work, Dan enjoys live music, board games and quiz shows, and is making a slow but persistent effort to learn Spanish.