Mike Duke

About

Mike Duke is a pioneering researcher in agricultural robotics based in New Zealand, whose work focuses on automating labor-intensive horticultural tasks through machine vision, robotic systems, and artificial intelligence. Duke has made transformative contributions to kiwifruit agriculture, developing and evaluating robotic harvesting systems that leverage convolutional neural networks and sophisticated robotic arms — work that has garnered over 330 citations in a single landmark 2019 paper alone. Recognizing the mounting pressures on New Zealand's horticultural industry, he has tackled multiple fronts simultaneously: beyond harvesting, Duke pioneered autonomous robotic pollination systems designed to address the global decline of natural pollinators like bees, demonstrating that robots can successfully pollinate individual kiwifruit flowers with commercial viability. His research further extends to optimizing multi-arm Cartesian robot configurations for harvesting efficiency and designing heavy-duty autonomous navigation platforms for orchard environments. More recently, Duke has broadened his scope to include grapevine pruning robotics and asparagus harvesting, reflecting a commitment to solving New Zealand's wider agricultural labor crisis. With nearly 800 cumulative citations, his body of work represents some of the most impactful applied robotics research in precision horticulture globally.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Robotic kiwifruit harvesting using machine vision, convolutional neural networks, and robotic arms

   330 citations · 2019
2. 2
   Improvements to and large‐scale evaluation of a robotic kiwifruit harvester

   109 citations · 2019
3. 3
   Autonomous pollination of individual kiwifruit flowers: Toward a robotic kiwifruit pollinator

   96 citations · 2019
4. 4
   Work distribution of multiple Cartesian robot arms for kiwifruit harvesting

   90 citations · 2020
5. 5
   Design and testing of a heavy-duty platform for autonomous navigation in kiwifruit orchards

   52 citations · 2019
6. 6
   Modelling wine grapevines for autonomous robotic cane pruning

   31 citations · 2023
7. 7
   Evaluating the Quality of Kiwifruit Pollinated with an Autonomous Robot

   16 citations · 2021
8. 8
   Workspace analysis of Cartesian robot system for kiwifruit harvesting

   15 citations · 2020
9. 9
   Robotic Pollination - Targeting kiwifruit flowers for commercial application

   15 citations · 2017
10. 10
    Investigation of Optimal Network Architecture for Asparagus Spear Detection in Robotic Harvesting

    14 citations · 2019

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links