Researching the feasibility of enhancing the productivity of daffodil harvesting through the use of a daffodil collection robotic platform (Daffy)

园艺——种植蔬菜、水果、观赏植物和花卉供应市场，传统上为种植者提供了小块土地的高收入，尽管投入成本高于谷物或油菜等传统可耕地作物。然而，自2020年以来，用于园艺的土地总面积减少了15%。英国上议院最近的一份名为《播种》的报告指出，造成这种情况的原因包括能源和化肥成本高、劳动力短缺和劳动力成本高，以及超市使用低成本进口产品带来的价格压力。我们想要改变的是一个多功能机器人平台，能够完成拖拉机或收割机等简单机器无法自动完成的园艺任务。为了取得商业上的成功，我们必须首先确定劳动力短缺最严重的任务，以及种植者获得足够的收入，使他们值得投资于技术。为此，我们已经开发了一种芦笋收割机，并将在未来三年内推出。与种植者的交谈强调，花卉生产，特别是水仙花，也是一个有希望发展能力的领域。在这个项目中，我们将开发一个复杂的机械臂，并将其集成到一个重量小于45kg的平台上。这将压缩土壤比人类更少的这两个和其他应用程序，开发后项目。人工视觉系统将识别采摘的花朵，供手臂收集和运输。项目结束后，我们将扩展人工视觉系统，以识别成熟的花朵。我们将使用的技术很容易适用于英国常见的其他切花。这也将有助于将机器人平台应用于水果和蔬菜采摘。除了技术开发，我们还将与一家成熟的农业劳动力解决方案提供商合作，他们正在建立一个专注于租赁和管理RaaS（机器人即服务）的业务部门。他们有兴趣将我们的租赁平台提供给他们已建立的客户基础，即寻求季节性劳动力的种植者。这个项目的成功将降低英国种植者的劳动力成本。这将减少水仙花生产增长的障碍，水仙花对种植者来说是一个利润丰厚的出口市场。由于劳动力短缺在发达经济体普遍存在，我们希望向荷兰的种植者大量出口机器人，英国目前从荷兰进口大量鲜切花。

Horticulture- growing vegetables, fruit, ornamental plants and flowers for market has traditionally offered growers high incomes from small areas of land, albeit with higher input costs than conventional arable crops like cereals or oilseed rape. However, the total land area used for horticulture has declined by 15% since 2020\. The recent _Sowing the Seeds_ report from the House of Lords identified high energy and fertiliser costs, shortages of labour and high labour costs and price pressure from supermarkets using low-cost imports as reasons for this. Our vision to change this is a multi-functional robotic platform, capable of horticultural tasks that cannot be automated using simple machines like tractors or harvesters.For commercial success, we must first identify tasks where labour shortages are most serious and growers receive enough income to make it worthwhile for them to invest in technology. To that end, we have already developed an asparagus harvester and will launch this in the next three years. Talking to growers highlighted that flower production, specifically daffodils, was also a promising area to develop capabilities. In this project, we will develop a sophisticated robotic arm and integrate this to a platform weighing <45kg. This will compact soil less than a human for both this and other applications, developed post-project. An artificial vision system will recognise picked flowers for the arm to collect and transport. Post project, we will extend the artificial vision system to recognise flowers that are ripe for picking. We will use technology that is easily adaptable to other cut flowers commonly grown in the UK. This will also be useful to apply the robotic platform to fruit and vegetable picking.Beyond technical development, we will be working with an established agricultural labour solution provider who are establishing an arm to their business focused on renting and managing RaaS (Robots-as-a-Service). They are interested in offering our platform for rent to their established customer base of growers seeking seasonal labour.Success in this project will see reduced labour costs for English growers. This will reduce barriers to growth of daffodil production, which is a lucrative export market for growers. With labour shortages common across developed economies, we hope to make significant export sales of robots to growers in the Netherlands, from where the UK currently imports large volumes of cut flowers.