IEEE RAS TC on Agricultural Robotics and Automation Webinar
Title: Agrofood Robotics and Automation: From Farm to Table
Speaker: Rick van de Zedde, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Netherlands
This is a unique opportunity to hear from a researcher who also leads efforts to commercialize ag robotics technology. Don't miss it!
Abstract: Companies in the agro-food sector aim to deliver consistent quality, but objective determination of quality is not easy since no two natural products are alike. Besides that, many quality criteria cannot be observed by the human eye during the production process, and manual work is both expensive and unreliable.
New technology developments, however, make it possible to quickly carry out objective quality inspections of food products from farm to table. This webinar will explore these technologies, including cameras and optical sensors, computer vision systems, and robotics. Mr. van de Zedde will discuss advanced approaches for both two- and three-dimensional visual inspection, objective color measurement, and near infrared (NIR) hyperspectral inspection that reveals “invisible” deviations, along with advanced methods for automatic image processing. He will explain how “robotizing” the handling of food products allows many companies to strengthen their competitive position.
The webinar will use actual examples—including long-term academic research and industrial applications—to illustrate and to elaborate the future perspective of R&D in this field.
Bio: Rick van de Zedde is a senior researcher/business developer for Computer Vision at the Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research institute, where he has worked since 2004. His background is in Artificial Intelligence with a focus on imaging and robotics. In 2002 he graduated with a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Groningen. Since 2006 he has been a coordinator of GreenVision, the centre of expertise for image processing in the agrifood industry (http://greenvision.wur.nl).
He also takes an active role in research. In 2011, he was head of the MARVIN-project, in which he and his team developed a tomato seedling inspection approach based on 3D reconstruction. In the current EU project EPPN, he is the leader of the “Novel Instrumentation for Plant Phenotyping” work package. He is one of the initiators of the EU PicknPack project – food packaging with robots. PicknPack, EPPN and other industry-funded research projects explore the potential of fast 3D shape and colour analysis of agrifood products and vision-guided robotics, areas in which Wageningen UR has recently made significant breakthroughs.
