CATCH experiment explores novel, lightweight, modular and cheap, nevertheless robust multi-arm robotic systems, built of standardised components, providing economic basis and use cases for agricultural applications. It aims at developing a flexible, cost-efficient and reconfigurable/scalable hortibotic outdoor solution for automated harvesting in challenging natural conditions by addressing critical problems, such as fruit perception and fast picking actions. The use case of outdoor cucumber harvesting has been selected taking into account the need from relevant end-users, the technological challenges, as well as the economic impact in various European regions.

Background: In Germany, cucumbers for pickling are mainly grown in Bavaria and in the Spreewald-region. Until today, cucumbers have to be harvested manually causing high production costs. New harvesting technologies could improve competitiveness of cucumber production not only for German producers but in various European regions.   

Partners in CATCH (Cucumber Gathering – Green Field Experiments) are the coordinating Fraunhofer Institute Production Systems and Design Technology Berlin (IPK Fraunhofer), the CSIC-UPM Centre for Automation and Robotics, Spain, and the ATB. Research work at ATB focuses on the testing the technology in the field and on product quality of the mechanically harvested cucumbers. 

Contact ATB: Jelena Surdilovic

Program Flyer (PDF) of Workshops (in German)

More: http://catch-echord.blogspot.de/ 

The project Cucumber Gathering – Green Field Experiments CATCH (echord.eu/catch/) is funded by EU in the framework of ECHORD++ EXPERIMENTS. ECHORD++ funds small-scale research projects called experiments with a maximum duration of 18 months. Cooperative research is done in academia-industry consortia, based on actual used cases. ECHORD++ promotes the fast uptake of robotics technology into industry.