Masataka Nakamura

What it does

<b>Summary</b> Masataka Nakamura, a PhD researcher, created a tomato harvesting robot at his 5ha advanced farm to lighten the harvesting workload and increase harvesting productivity. The Tomato Harvesting Robots can select and pick tomatoes of certain colors at night by using a special image recognition ML algorithms. The robots can continue to work at night in unmanned greenhouses, maximizing harvesting output. These Tomato Harvesting Robots are co-developed with Panasonic. <b>Background</b> Harvesting is presently done at the pace of one tomato every six seconds. Since people can pick one tomato every 2-3 seconds, the people are faster, but people can only work for about 3-4 hours. On the other hand, the Tomato Harvesting Robots can work for 10 consecutive hours or more, and they can also work at night, so the farm considers this speed to be sufficient for them. <b>Key features</b> • Ripeness detection (even for partially covered tomatoes) • Precision harvesting • High-res camera • High accuracy at night