Addressing the challenge of agri-food variability
Robots have been extremely successful in the past decades, for instance in the car industry, and have also entered the agri-food production chain.
However, current robot technology is no match to human workers when it comes to dealing with variation and flexibility. The NWO Perspective programme FlexCraft addresses the scientific challenge of how to deal with large variations in shape, size and softness of agri-food products in combination with variations in environment and tasks in a robust way. This Mikroniek article describes how FlexCraft aims to equip robot technology with generic capabilities in active perception, world modelling, planning and control, and gripping and manipulation. (Photo courtesy of FlexCraft)
