Junior: a robot for outdoor container nurseries

Production of nursery crops in the US is accomplished in containerand field-growing conditions, with propagation and seedling-rearing carried out in greenhouses; 11% of the US national farm-product is represented by these crops. Container-grown crops represent 60% of the US market and represent a highly labor-intensive and thus costly segment of ornamental crop production. The USDA, NASA and the ANLA have collaborated to develop an automated in-field containerhandling system for reducing dependence on foreign labor while also increasing productivity. A prototype system was developed at CMU, capable of automatically lifting and conveying plants from the ground (in a variety of regular patterns) onto trailers, and vice-versa. The system is capable of handling a vast array of container-designs from different manufacturers, and spans the size-range from #1 to #3 (approximate equivalence to US gallons). The system is designed to handle 35,000 containers per 8-hour day with one to two operators. Field-trials currently underway has shown the system to reliably handle 29,000 #1 containers per 8hour day with less than a 3% failure-rate. Testing in various growth-zones and surfaces is underway, with commercialization efforts in Europe/US. 1. Industry Overview US ornamental horticulture is a rapidly growing, $11 billion dollar a year industry (about 11% of the gross agricultural output of the US alone), tied to a dwindling migrant work force, working in outdoor conditions in very large acreage areas (see Figure 1). Unskilled labor is becoming more costly and harder to find, while it is still needed to move potted plants this represents a manual handling task of at least 450 million units per year, each handled 3 to 4 times a year. The US nursery industry must address this problem if it is to survive and continue to flourish in the millennium. Nursery production automation is a growing field worldwide. At the highest level there are three main areas, namely greenhouse operations, container yards and field nurseries. Within these groupings, there are several areas that lend themselves to automation (see Table 1): Figure 1 : Typical container nursery view & labor task Table 1 : Automation Areas for Nursery Industry In these areas it was judged [2] that automation has achieved different levels of automation-penetration worldwide (see levels in histogram shown in Figure 2). Figure 2 : Automation Levels in Nursery Industry AREA AUTOMATION-FRIENDLY Greenhouse Seed/Propagate, Pick/Ship, Gather, Transplant/Set Container Yard Field Movement. Upshifting, Order-Picking, Shipping Field Nursery Dig, Plant, Stake, Harvest, Container Handling 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%