Toward Smart Tomato Greenhouse: The Fourth Tomato Harvesting Robot Competition

Abstract

Agriculture, one of the most important industries for human life, is faced with serious problems, the shortage of workers, the falling birthrate and the aging population, global warming and natural disasters, etc. Tomato is one of the most important fruit vegetables, and most tomatoes in Japan are cultivated in the greenhouses, or large scale farms as the solution for effective production toward smart greenhouses, whereas the high temperature and high humidity, construction and management costs are big problems and technologies such as environmental control system, factory automation technology, AI, robotics are required. We had held Tomato Harvesting Robot competition from 2014 toward realization of smart tomato greenhouse aiming at promote the automated tomato harvesting to reduce the working time of harvesting. In this paper, we report on the tomato harvesting robot competition and the results mainly from the fourth competition.