欧洲顶级食品生产商探索垂直农场的机器人和自动化

A story of autonomous farming containersand affordable custom robotics Our customer is a topEuropean food producerwith exceptional agriculturalpractices and a solid commitmentto excellence and sustainability atevery step in the value chain. They’reknown as innovators. Therefore, itwasn’t surprising when they began,as they describe, "to tackle thechallenges of agriculture with newtechnologies." The answer:Yes, but only if theoperating costs of growing newcrops in the vertical farm are lowerthan growing them using traditionalagricultural practices. WHY SOFTSERVE? There aren’t many companies like SoftServe, with aproven record of successfully delivering complex end-to-end solutions involving both hardware and softwarecomponents—from advisory through prototyping to theactual product launch and support. Running vertical farms on aproduction scale can be expensiveif it involves manual operations.Dedicated resources performingroutine tasks are cost prohibitivein countries with high salary rates.Therefore, our client decided toinvest in a research and development(R&D) initiative to automate manualtasks inside the vertical farmingcontainer, making it economicallyattractive. Typically, R&D for arobotics project is costlyand out of reach formany organizations.SoftServe designed, tested,prototyped, and built therobotics hardware andautomation platformremotely. Our experts useda robotics simulation to gainearly feedback that allowedus to reduce the numberof physical prototypeiterations—significantlyreducing project costs. It was a great success. After thoroughly analyzing disruptiveagriculture technologies, ourcustomer pursued advanced verticalfarming techniques. However, theyquickly discovered that growing theirproduct in vertical farms would besignificantly less profitable thancontinuing to grow it as usual—onfree land. Join me as I briefly discussvertical farming, walkthrough the SoftServeVertical Farming RobotProject, and explainwhy designing hardwareremotely is a big deal formanufacturing companies. They chose SoftServe as theirstrategic innovation partner forthis project and made SoftServe’srobotics and engineering team theirR&D team. The question was asked:Could the production expertise and skillsgained in their traditional farmingpractices help them step into a newbusiness—growing new producetypes in vertical farms located closeto their consumers? Vertical farming is a wayof growing food indoors,typically in multistorybuildings stacked with growingcontainers. You can almost guess theadvantages, like: There are many reasons why it's soexpensive, and thevertical farmingWikipedia pageprovides an excellentoverview of the advantages andproblems. A LITTLE ABOUTVERTICAL FARMING In our customer’s case, the businessmodel requires their vertical farmsto be in relatively high-pricedliving areas, making hiring thepeople to run the farms expensive.Vertical farming containers withoutadvanced technologies are laborintensive, requiring manual seeding,transplanting, and harvesting. Expanding the rangeof products grown,particularly in a changingclimate WHYISN'TEVERYONEEXPLORINGTHISOPTION? Reducing theenvironmentalimpact SoftServe’s robotics andengineering expertspartnered with ourcustomer’s agriculturalgurus to design and buildrobotics and advancedsoftware technologies forthe selected configurationof the vertical farmingcontainer, automating asmany farming tasks aspossible. The intendedresult is to reduce the costsof personnel needed torun the vertical farm andmake growing crops in thevertical farm profitable. Limiting the useof pesticides orherbicides Creating viable farmsin remote areas Considering the advantages, whyisn't every food manufacturer usingvertical farming for at least somecrops? Simply put, running a verticalfarm is significantly more expensivethan traditional farming. THE SOFTSERVEVERTICAL FARMINGROBOT HOW IT WORKS AND WHY IT’S SO REVOLUTIONARYIN AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES. SoftServe built a pre-programmedrobot in simulation consisting ofa static platform with a movablerobotic arm. We simulated howthe hardware behaves in the givenenvironment to properly test how itworks before building the hardwareitself. The current implementation ofthe robot took over about 80% of the The goal of the ongoingproject is to design a customrobot to achieve full-scaleautomation inside the verticalfarming container, so it becomes anautonomous unit entirely controlledby technology. Once completed,vertical farming becomes a moreviable farming option. activities that were previously donemanually, e.g., the monitoring ofplants and transplanting of plants. 1Each iteration of the design wasfocused on: THE VERTICALFARMINGROBOT’S VALUE 2Finding the best ways of movingthe robot in a restricted space andfollowing safety regulations withoutimpacting the environment itself. 3Ensuring the arm is stableenough to reach out of the container's highwalls. The team came up with a custom solution that can easily plug into the