Challenge

In recent years, fruit cultivation has been difficult in Belgium, think of the apple and pears boycott from Russia, competition with low-wage countries, finding suitable personnel with sufficient experience. These are often major obstacles to creating economies of scale and increasing one’s competitiveness. If this increase in scale is not forthcoming and prices remain low, fruit cultivation is doomed to disappear in Belgium.

The personnel issue could be significantly reduced if a number of tasks were to be automated. Many tasks in fruit cultivation consist of driving around in the orchard with a vehicle (tractor or pick wagon / platform worker) and performing out certain actions. An important automation tool can be the use of fruit harvesting robots so that seasonal work can be reduced. In recent years, the industry has strongly focused on autonomous driving: position determination, calculating trajectories that the vehicle must follow. However, vehicle localisation and a safe operation of the system are still important challenges.

Project goals

The objective is realising one lightweight and one heavy autonomous fruit cultivation platform. In these platforms, driving will be linked to specific autonomously executed tasks which require less personnel. This automation will be compared with the conventional non-autonomous task versions. Two vehicles will be developed:

  1. A lightweight electric vehicle will perform mowing, weed control and crop harvesting tasks,
  2. A heavy diesel vehicle will be used as pick-up train for spraying and frost protection purposes.

Octinion has invested heavily in autonomous navigation in recent years and is able to offer a cost-efficient and reliable solution. BAP Bamps has years of experience in building tools and vehicles for this sector. Flanders Make uses its expertise to study the safety aspect of autonomous driving.

Economic value

The Flemish fruit cultivation sector has an annual production worth about 400 million euro. Finding suitable personnel for the labour-intensive tasks is getting more and more difficult so that automation is the best solution to keep this economic activity in Flanders.

By automating the different tasks, a scale-up can be guaranteed and, together with diversification, this will create an economic advantage over competition abroad.

In a first stage, this automation will create both time and economic benefits. Automation will allow to perform certain actions simultaneously and to optimise specific operations. Through the use of completely automated processes, costs can be significantly reduced.

Contact

Please contact general project leader Jan Anthonis from Octinion for more information.