Ubot: Citrus Harvesting Robot

About Ubot
Ubot in partnership with Improvis created a joint project which aimed to develop an autonomous, robotic citrus picking system that gives farmers a low-cost alternative to an unpredictable labour cost. When the idea of Ubot became public, SproutX which catalyses connections between Australian founders, investors, industry mentors, and government, made an investment in Ubot aiming to affect world-class innovation across the agrifood supply chain. Here you can find out how Ubot works.

Problems and suggested solution
Australian Citrus Farmers have expensive and unreliable labour. Farmers compete for a limited pool of pickers as they cannot get enough labour to pick fruit and labour is their highest cost of production. Here Ubot comes to solve these problems.
Ubot Autonomous Citrus Harvester uses deep learning object detection algorithms to pick oranges. A soft-touch gripper removes oranges from trees and places them in the bin. The robot searches the entire tree top to bottom up to 1 metre inside the tree then moves to the next tree.Ubot Autonomous Citrus Picking Robot is using Azure Kinect for 3D cloud position and Mask-rcnn for detection . The algorithm detects oranges on trees and uses a depth map to send commands to robot motors to pick them. The robot is able to pick an orange within 5-10 seconds. The speed is similar to a human. The robot cost to the farmer is $10 a 400kg bin of oranges instead of $30 a 400kg bin for a human.

Advantages of using robot for harvesting are as follows:   

• Ubot Autonomous Citrus Harvester picks oranges using deep learning
• The speed is similar to a human 
• Costs less than a human 
• Works 24/7

Above mentioned facts prove that Ubot bridges the rural labor supply gap in intensive horticulture with machine efficiency, enabling farmers to save the trouble of finding pickers.