He works during the week, on weekends, during the day, at night, and he doesn’t complain, although an ordinary farmer’s back would already hurt. You are looking at a robot protecting one of the famous cultural heritages of the Netherlands instead of humans.
You can listen to and view information and footage in the introductory video report.
Even the beautiful Dutch tulips are threatened by the so-called variegated virus. In the best case, it changes the color and size of the leaves. In the worst case, the flowers die. And so it is necessary to go through and check their kilometers.
“Every tulip field has a certain percentage of diseased tulips, and each year they need to be removed to prevent other healthy tulips from being infected. Until now we have done this manually and we have never done everything in one year because it was too much. And today we have a robot with us. He is really amazing. Can work all day, all night, weekends. He never takes a break. And it does it better than humans,” Allan Visser, a third-generation tulip grower who has been using it for the second season, describes his impressions in the introductory video report of this article.
How does the machine work?
The cart-like robot is called Selector180, but is nicknamed Theo and was developed by Delft-based startup H2L Robotics. He drives and works at a pace of one kilometer per hour, which is a quarter of the average human walking speed. But if the farmer should walk through the fields and look at the tulips along the way, he also walks more slowly. However, the machine does not get tired compared to it. In addition, artificial intelligence helps him in his flawless control, so he picks out the affected flowers and marks them with GPS very precisely.
“The heart of the device is the knowledge we put into the AI model. Knowledge comes from tulip farmers. We put them all together into the AI model, then into the machine, and then they’re used by these three cameras that capture images from three angles. We combine the angles to find the very precise GPS coordinates of the sick flowers, with the help of the GPS antenna on its roof. It remembers them as it passes by and we activate it, the last camera then captures the final image for very precise aiming of the injector,” adds Erik de Jong, director of H2L Robotics on how the robot works and cares for the tulips.
Expensive as a sports car
The machine is an expensive, Dutch agro-robotics startup founded in 2019, which claims to be the world’s first autonomous tulip-sorting robot, and charges 185,000 euros for it, roughly 4.7 million crowns. Even with this price tag, 45 of them are already in service in the Netherlands last year.
“Also, you can buy a very nice sports car instead of this robot. But I choose a robot, because a sportsman won’t take care of sick tulips. Yes, it is expensive, but there are fewer and fewer people who can actually tell diseased tulips with their own eyes. So it’s a bit of a necessary purchase because the disease seekers in our tulip fields, as we call them, are kind of dying out,” concludes Dutch farmer Allan Visser.
Tags: robot artificial intelligence checks health tulips Netherlands
