It's been more than 2 years since we last reported on Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation. Now Joe Jones, Harvest's co-founder and CTO, has given an interview to the Robots Podcast to let us know what they've been up to.
What they've come up with is surprising. Agriculture may not seem like the easiest way to start: it's an outdoor application which means dealing with rain, mud, and temperature variations, environments are typically very unstructured, your typical user is unlikely to be highly skilled in software or automation, and tasks are normally accomplished using big machinery - all very different from the Roomba. However, Harvest has found a niche application which eliminates at least two of these challenges and which - they hope - can act as a stepping stone.
Harvest is targeting wholesale shrub farms as the one in the image above, which can have as many as 3 million containers of ornamental plants in 500 acres. Their robots lift and move the plants to perform tasks like spacing potted plants in grids - an operation that has to be repeated as plants grow, to efficiently use space at first, and then again to avoid that they grow into each other. The current human workers will essentially serve as supervisors to Harvest’s robots - they still give direction at a high level, but the machines are doing the heavy lifting. First trials have proven very successful, and the team is now working on a production version.
The Robots podcast interview with Joe Jones gives a deep insight into what it takes to bridge the gap between academia and industry. Jones explains more about the how's and why's of Harvest Automation, why moving potted plants is the next logical step after the Roomba and how they plan to tap into a potentially huge market for autonomous robots.
