Bio-inspired robotics

One policy announced by the government in early 2018 was support for the development of high-tech innovations to make UK agri-businesses more productive and profitable, while improving resilience and protecting the environment.

Someone who recognises the complexity of this challenge is Dr Belinda Clarke, Director of Agri-Tech East, an ‘innovation hub’ of farmers, growers, scientists and entrepreneurs focused on improving the competitiveness of agriculture.

“Aligning the expectations of farmers with the nature of cutting-edge research is a challenge,” says Clarke, “and some of the frontier discovery research is quite a long way from market.

“Part of the skill is in being able to introduce farmers to research and innovation at different places along the ‘technology readiness’ spectrum – from the very blue-sky, to the more applied work that’s closer to market, and helping them to appreciate the potential impact.” Belinda Clarke

“It’s all about bringing innovation to end users in a way that’s immediately applicable to them,” she says.

As an active member of Agri-Tech East, the University is building connections across the whole breadth of the agri-food chain. In the Department of Engineering’s Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Dr Fumiya Iida wants to apply his expertise in robotics to the automation of agricultural processes. He’s interested in the challenge of creating robots that can effectively deal with ‘soft’ objects, like fruit and vegetables, without damaging them.

“Robots are really terrible at manipulating soft objects,” says Iida. “It’s so easy for us humans, but robot technology is designed for a rigid world. Assembling cars, for example, is much easier for them compared with manipulating fruit and vegetables.”

Your browser does not support this video Julia Cai works with Fumiya Iida on lettuce-picking robot technology Julia Cai works with Fumiya Iida on lettuce-picking robot technology

Using an electrically conductive soft material, his team is making robots that are sensitive to light, chemicals and other stimuli, enabling them to deal with uncertain tasks in unstructured environments, like farmers’ fields. He calls the work ‘bio-inspired robotics’ – looking at biology and why humans are good at certain tasks, and trying to create robots to do the same.

Soft robots could have many applications, from harvesting crops, to packaging or quality control, to peeling and wrapping vegetables. “Across the supply chain there are so many challenges of soft manipulation,” says Iida. “Robots could work in conditions that are terrible for human workers, like cooking beetroot in vinegar for the supermarkets. Imagine working in a noisy, hot, smelly factory all day long – at the moment humans have to do it because there’s no other solution.”

He adds: “We have many agricultural companies in East Anglia and they’re all aware that automation is the future for farming, but they don’t know where to start. And we don’t know where to start because we don’t know what the problems are.” By bringing the two groups together through targeted workshops in Cambridge, conversations are starting to happen and collaborations are beginning to emerge.

Clarke says Iida is just one example of the real willingness of researchers not just to disseminate knowledge generated within the University, but also to take on board the knowledge from within the farming community and embed it in research thinking for the future.

Iida is collaborating with G’s Growers, based in Cambridgeshire, to automate the beetroot cooking process and to develop a soft robot to harvest vegetables such as lettuce. “Automation is necessary if you want to scale up agricultural processes to feed a growing population,” he says, adding “development of new technology doesn’t just happen in the lab.”