For greenhouse growers, staying ahead of the competition in a saturated and mature market is a top priority to ensure a steady and successful business. Keeping up to date with the latest developments in precision greenhouse robotics technology is the key. This article offers forward-thinking Chief Technical Officers an overview of the advancements in greenhouse robotics, and why it is the engine driving the future of greenhouse growing.
The autonomous greenhouse and the benefits of greenhouse robotics
Every grower knows that consistency is a vital ingredient to ensure top-quality produce. With unpredictable harvests, labour shortages, natural gas price hikes and myriad of other challenges, maintaining this consistency in the greenhouse can be difficult.
But innovation and technology in automation and robotics show vast potential to boost operations and improve overall performance and yield. New developments in automation and robotics, particularly in robotics, have led to the advent of AI-enabled robotic co-workers that bring a new level of consistency, accuracy and machine precision to greenhouse cultivation and harvesting. This new revolution in AI promises to revolutionise the landscape of agriculture. For business owners and operators, making a decisive early investment in greenhouse robotics will deliver sweeping benefits that future-proof the growth, haves and quality of various crops.
High-tech greenhouse automation such as robotics, driven by AI machine learning, will deliver benefits ranging from labour saving costs, to precision harvesting, and diagnosis of issues with each individual tomato plant. The possibilities of growing in the automated greenhouse are endless and the revolution is only just beginning.
What does greenhouse robotics mean for your business?
Truss tomato growers are ideally placed to be one of the first to benefit from high automation greenhouse integration. Not only do tomato crops account for one of the largest acreages of greenhouse vegetables, and therefore the largest market for robotics, but margins for tomato farming in Europe are slim, and the smallest adjustment in greenhouse functions can impact a grower’s bottom line. As well as this, greenhouse tomatoes are a very labour-intensive crop. Automating large parts of the crop work such as harvesting and de-leafing can greatly decrease expensive labour needs.
This is where AI and robotics can be hugely advantageous. A robotic machine in a greenhouse adds a whole new dimension of precision, harvesting not just tomatoes but data. By using a robotic machine - such as the market-leading GRoW robot - growers instantly have more visibility and control over the state of their crops, and granular levels of data from each harvest, root to tip. Data is critical to understanding the health and performance of the crop and exactly what resources it requires to develop into high-quality produce.
Greenhouse technology is developing rapidly, with robotics and automation gaining functions that deliver precision horticulture, increasing commercial growers’ sustainability. Horticulture robots such as GRoW can compile data on each plant and location, which can then be analyzed to optimize production and accurately distribute costly resources like fertilizer, CO2, pesticides and water, where it will be most effective. This reduces the wastage of scarce and expensive resources and can deliver savings through cost-cutting, precision, and data-driven growth.
Advanced robotics like GRoW also have the ability to alleviate labour shortage stresses. Many growers contend with scarcity in the labour market, and inconsistent labour performance which can harm crop quality and limit the potential yield. Though not a replacement for traditional labour, the GRoW tomato harvesting robot applies a level of rigorous process and consistency that will future-proof businesses against inevitable labour shortages. Rather than having to retrain and up-skill workers as new employees come and go, robotics provide an automated, evergreen worker in the greenhouse that has a longer lifecycle, is able to work uninterrupted for long periods, and hold a vast cache of data and logged processes.
Stay up to date and download the whitepaper: Robotics in Horticulture
When it comes to greenhouse robotics, labour-saving robotic technology, precision growing and data-mining are only the beginning. Today, there are many robots available that are single-point solutions. This will soon be a thing of the past, as robots platforms like GRoW become ubiquitous. Multipurpose solutions like the GRoW robot are part of a platform that will develop and grow with many scale functions, with new developments unlocked by technological advancement. GRoW is made for more!
The future of greenhouse growing is automated. Investing in a co-bot to work alongside an existing team is the first step toward genuinely future-proofing operations and cutting costs while producing the highest possible quality produce.
Take your first action toward transforming your greenhouse with high-tech automation. Download the whitepaper here:
