Prof. Eldert van Henten

Short Bio: 

Prof.dr.ir. Eldert J. van Henten is personal professor of Biosystems Engineering at the Agricultural Biosystems Engineering Group of Wageningen University. Van Henten is active in the field of agricultural robotics for close to 30 years. He is passionate about integrating fundamental concepts in vision and robotics into working demonstrators of agricultural robotics while addressing engineering scientific challenges at TRL 4 to 6. Contributing to various EU funded projects and leading the NWO funded Perspective Program FlexCraft, resulted in proof of concept demonstrators of fruit harvesting robots, autonomous field robots and a robot for manipulating chicken parts in the food processing industry as well as a wealth of insights into key robotic challenges and potential solution directions. Van Henten is (co-)author of more than 200 papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings yielding an h-index of 45 in Scopus, 57 in Google Scholar and 48 in Research Gate. Between 2010 and 2023 he served as (co-)chair of various topic groups related to his agricultural robotics expertise within RoboNed, IEEE-RAS, ISHS and SPARC – euRobotics.

Why autonomous robots are still not commonly used in greenhouses and what we can do about that…

A quick review of available technology in protected cultivation will reveal that there is quite some technology on the market and in use in advanced greenhouse operations. Still, even then these production systems heavily lean on human labour especially for the more complex and challenging tasks. Continuously growing labour costs and increasing challenges with the sourcing of sufficiently trained personnel pose a serious threat to labour intensive farming practices like protected cultivation. Support and substitution of human labour by machines is more frequently called for. Yet, in the more challenging tasks, the perception, cognition, decision making and eye-hand coordination of humans still excel those of machines. Until recently, no autonomous robotic solutions were adopted in greenhouse crop production, despite decades of research and development. This presentation will review the state of the art in greenhouse mechanisation and robotics and will address a number of technical and non-technical challenges for deployment of autonomous systems in the more complex operations in protected cultivation. Solution directions offering an opportunity to counter these challenges will be indicated.