Strawberry harvest of the future: AI robot SHIVAA is revolutionizing fruit growing!

Strawberry harvest of the future: AI robot SHIVAA is revolutionizing fruit growing!

In times of rising wage costs, harvesting strawberries is becoming a major challenge for many farmers in Germany. A newly developed AI-controlled robot, called SHIVAA, could play a crucial role here. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has introduced this fully autonomous robot, which was specifically designed to be used in outdoor crops. Using state-of-the-art camera technology, SHIVAA detects ripe strawberries and picks them independently by navigating along the rows of plants and harvesting the fruit with its gripping arms. The device can collect up to 15 kilograms of strawberries per hour and has an operating time of at least eight hours at a time, making it a valuable partner for farmers facing high labor costs and the risk of crop losses. This reports freipresse.de.

Operations manager Jan van Leeuwen points out that a significant part of production costs, namely 60%, is caused by wages. The robot's technology aims to reduce these costs and thus offer the strawberries cheaper in the supermarket. For many farmers, this is a hoped-for relief, as competition from abroad, especially from Spain, is increasingly affecting them. At the same time, yields in Germany have fallen in recent years, leading to a decline in outdoor cultivation of around 33 percent since 2015. Therefore, SHIVAA could represent an interesting solution to maintain the competitiveness of German strawberry farmers, as well it-boltwise.de determines.

Technological innovation and development

SHIVAA is currently still undergoing tests at the Glantz strawberry farm in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in close cooperation with the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. The robot will be further developed over the next few years before it can be mass produced. Experts estimate that it could take up to seven years for SHIVAA to be used on a larger scale in the fields. The technology behind SHIVAA is characterized by a combination of machine learning and robotics, which increases its efficiency and accuracy in harvesting. Furthermore, it is also possible that this technology can be transferred to other types of fruit.

The topic of autonomous robots in agriculture is becoming increasingly important. Similar to SHIVAA, the robot RoLand is also being developed, which is able to pick strawberries independently. This robot also uses vision technologies and GPS for precise navigation in the fields. While RoLand is being tested outdoors for the first time this year, SHIVAA is already in use on a specific strawberry farm. Both robots are not intended to be developed to replace human workers, but rather to support and relieve the burden on farmers tagesschau.de highlights.

The future of the strawberry harvest

The increasing wage costs in the area of ​​harvest work, which have led to enormous pressure on German strawberry farmers since the introduction of a minimum wage of 12.41 euros per hour in 2024, could be alleviated somewhat by the implementation of such technologies. Robots like SHIVAA and RoLand not only offer a practical solution to current challenges in agriculture, but also help to ensure the quality of the strawberry harvest. Since the robots are also able to work at night, the risk of crop losses is further minimized. It remains to be seen how quickly this technology can be put into practice and how it will change German agriculture.