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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Abundant Robotics

Zimplistic’s Rotimatic Can Now Make Flour Tortillas

Zimplistic announced today that it has added tortilla making and gluten-free functionality to its already immensely popular Rotimatic.

The Rotimatic is a connected countertop device that measures, dispenses, kneads and bakes dough to create ready-to-eat flatbreads in 90 seconds. According to the Zimplistic press announcement, its Rotimatic is “enjoyed by more than 50,000 families across 20 countries.” If we assume that 50,000 families equals 50,000 units sold, that’s an increase of 10,000 units since we last checked in with the company back in October, when it had sold 40,000 units.

The Rotimatic can already make a host of different flatbreads, including pizza dough, puris and pearl millet flour flatbread. In a statement, Zimplistic said that it’s been getting a lot of requests for tortilla capabilities, especially in the U.S. Adding tortillas to its roster, along with a gluten-free recipe could help ease the sting of the device’s high price tag of $1,000 and get more people to purchase the device.

Zimplistic will be at our Food Tech Live event this evening. We’ll be sure to sample the goods and report back on how they taste. Additionally, you can check out this podcast Mike Wolf did with Zimplistic Co-Founder, Rishi Israni.

The Harvesting-Robot Early Adopter Market Is Now Worth $5.5 Billion

Of all the uses for robots, harvesting plants seems like one of the most practical and therefore promising ways to put these machines to work.

I’m not alone in thinking this. Based on findings from 1,300 farmers recently surveyed by market research firm Alpha Brown, the robot-harvesting market is now worth $5.5 billion. And that’s just the early adopter segment. Because the robotics-for-harvesting segment is so new, and because most of the machines aren’t yet available for commercial use, Alpha Brown confined its findings to this segment.

But there’s much to discuss within that early adopter market. And while harvesting bots aren’t the only ones rolling around the farm these days, they serve an especially sensitive area of the agricultural supply chain.

Harvesting things like fruits and vegetables requires labor, and labor on farms is in short supply these days. In Santa Barbara County alone last year, $13 million of strawberries, broccoli, and produce was left to rot in the field because there weren’t enough workers harvest the crops. Another estimate states that 20 percent of produce grown in the U.S. never leaves the farm because of either labor shortage or cost of labor.

That shortage is, of course, wrapped up in a web of economics and politics I’ll leave you to read up on yourselves. The bottom line is that labor is an issue when it comes to harvesting produce, and robots are seen as one promising solution to the problem. 

The Alpha Brown report based the $5.5 billion market value on robots’ abilities to offset existing labor costs. Labor will, according to the report, “determine the level of implementation of this technology in the market.”

And while only about 3 percent of growers currently use robots for harvesting, there are plenty of choices out there for those considering. The following are just a few companies making promising moves in this space as they bring their bots to market.

Harvest Automation

Harvest Automation has been around since 2008, originally operating under the mission of using robotics to solve problems across various industries. The nursery and greenhouse market is one such area that needs the help, as the struggle to find enough labor is especially pervasive here.

Enter the HV-100, the company’s flagship product. Aside from looking a little like Wall-E, the robot automates the task of spacing of containerized plants commonly found in nursery operations. As plants grow, their containers need to be spaced increasingly farther apart to ensure a uniform canopy overhead. The HV-100, which is built to handle most container sizes, makes this manually-intensive task faster and more efficient, and the spacing more accurate.

The HV-100 is also designed to work alongside human laborers, rather than replace them, and can be used both outdoors and in.

Harvest Automation About Us

Agrobot

Fruit is far and above the most delicate type of produce out there, which makes the idea of using harvester robots especially practical. Spain-based company Agrobot has narrowed this idea down to one of the most sensitive fruits out there, the strawberry. The company’s SW6010 uses morphological and color analysis to determine, in real time, how ripe a fruit is, its size, and other factors that will determine whether it gets collected. The robot does this one strawberry at a time, which sounds like it would take forever but happens in seconds, according to Agrobot’s site.

Abundant Robotics

Hayward, Calif.-based startup Abundant Robotics spun out of SRI International and is currently testing a prototype that automates apple picking. Using computer vision algorithms, the robot locates the apples and picks them using a vacuum-like mechanism. To robot is designed to pick one fruit per second from the tree. At the same time, Abundant says the machine is gentle enough not to damage the fruit during the harvesting process.

The company is reportedly planning to go from prototype to mass production in 2018.

FRRobotics

FRRobotics takes the concept of harvesting delicate produce one step further with its machine, a grasping hand that can be adjusted based on the fruit it’s picking. Strawberries, for example, would need a much more delicate touch than apples. With FFRobotics’ yet-unnamed machine, a simple modification could accommodate those different needs. This also allows farm to use harvesters over multiple seasons.

The robot emulates the way an actual hand picks fruit and can pick, according to the company, “10 times more usable fruit than the average worker.” Like Abundant, FRRobotics’ machine uses advanced image processing to locate and harvest the fruit.

FFRobotics - The Future of Fresh Fruit Harvest

Energid

Energid makes a few different kinds of robots, among them a citrus harvesting system. The prototype system was tested in a Florida orange grove by mounting it to a four-axis hydraulic arm, which in turn was mounted to a truck. The result? The machine can pick an orange every two to three seconds, with 80 percent picking accuracy.

You can check out the machine shown in slow-motion below, to get an idea of just how many oranges two to three seconds yields.

Robotic Citrus Harvesting

Right now the biggest question mark seems to be cost. Farmers surveyed for the Alpha Brown who hadn’t yet integrated robotics into harvesting said the technology was either too costly or their farms weren’t big enough to justify the purchase. It’s a little early to tell if this will change as more robots become commercially available. But given the millions of dollars in un-harvested produce we’re losing, let’s hope these companies find a way to get more machines onto more farms, sooner rather than later.

Google Hopes Investment in AgTech Bears Fruit

Google and Apple together in an investment deal? Wait, it appears to be Google and apples—as in the fruit.

GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) is among those leading an investment round for Abundant Robotics, a Hayward, Calif.-based company whose robotic apple-picking machine has gained a lot of interest from the agricultural and financial sectors. Well into several trials, the device uses a combination of robotics and AI (in the forms of computer vision) to gently pluck apples from trees and carefully place them in bins for washing and packaging.  The $10 million Series A round will be used to commercialize the product.

Dan Steere, co-founder and CEO of Abundant Robotics says the path from prototype to the current stage—ready for commercialization within a year—is a slow and patient process. “The biggest challenge is understanding when you’re at a point with a set of technology that you can move from research to actually building a useful product, and that’s the hard part about startups; understanding when the capabilities are really ready,” Steere told AgFunder News in a recent interview. “In our case, there was a lot of foundational work and early research.  It wasn’t clear what we were trying to do would work, so there was a lot of interaction with growers though prototypes and real world testing to prove we were on the right track.”

Robotic apple picker trials continue in Washington

Steere’s team at Abundant Robotics came from SRI International, a non-profit research center, with its members bringing backgrounds in robotics and software. The initial funding to build a prototype came from The Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission which seems logical given Washington is among the leading apple-producing states in the country. Another investor in the company is BayWa, a German agricultural investment firm with interests in the New Zealand Envy Apple business.

The harvesting art of the robotics device is a refinement of previous technology-based attempts at reducing labor costs and increasing efficiencies in harvesting. What sets Abundant Robotics apart is its computer vision system which is able to identify the apple on the tree aside from the tree branches and other foliage. By carefully pinpointing the apple, there is less chance of damaging the fruit and the tree. The apple is then carefully plucked from the tree and softly put into the device’s bin.

Abundant Robotics is by no means alone in its quest to bring technology to the harvesting process. FFRobotics, an Israeli firm also is working on a similar solution which it claims can gently pick 10 times as much fruit as the average field worker. The company hopes to be in field testing by the end of the year.

Beyond fruit picking, Blue River Technology, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has smart boxes that hook on to tractors which identify the optimal location to plant, the right time to fertilize as well as the best time to harvest. Autonomous harvesting is gaining a lot of traction in Europe (perhaps even more than in the U.S.) with projects such as CROPS (Clever Robots for Crops) a Pan-European project sponsored by the EU. The goal is automation of the agricultural business and has manifested in such work as a greenhouse robotic pepper picker.

While certainly a delicate subject, the issue of replacing farm workers with robots must be addressed.

“Who knows what this administration will do or not do (related to immigration)?” said Jim McFerson, head of the Washington State Tree Fruit Research Center in Wenatchee told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. For farmers, “it’s a question of survival.”

Beyond immigration issues, there is grave concern among those farm workers whose livelihoods depend on regular work. The eventual loss of jobs for humans will be huge, said Erik Nicholson of Seattle, an official with the United Farm Workers union.

“They are scared of losing their jobs to mechanization,” Nicholson said. “A robot is not going to rent a house, buy clothing for their kids, buy food in a grocery and reinvest that money in the local economy.”