SWEEPER, an innovation driven international research programme for the development of the first generation market ready sweet pepper harvesting robot.
The research is being supported by the Horizon 2020 programme of European Union. Wageningen University & Research Centre will coordinate the international network in which partners from Sweden, Israel, Belgium and the Netherlands take part.
During the past decade fundamental research has led to insights and technology developments that will allow the SWEEPER partners to further develop the sweet pepper harvesting robot from the previous European project CROPS. The robot will be the first harvesting robot in the world, operating in a commercial greenhouse. The robot will strengthen Europe’s leading role in agricultural robotics. It will also improve the competitiveness of the European greenhouse sector, which faces a low availability of skilled workforce.
The first generation market ready sweet pepper harvesting robot will open a new high tech commercial area. SWEEPER aims at sweet pepper only, of which 1,300,000,000 kg is harvested in Europe yearly. It is expected that the knowledge and technology from the SWEEPER programme can easily be migrated to other greenhouse crops.
Source: http://www.wageningenur.nl/
A discussion of challenges related to the modeling and control of greenhouse crop growth, this book presents state-of-the-art answers to those challenges. The authors model the subsystems involved in successful greenhouse control using different techniques and show how the models obtained can be exploited for simulation or control design; they suggest ideas for the development of physical and/or black-box models for this purpose.
