Finding seasonal staff to harvest lettuce by hand is becoming increasingly difficult. Manual hands could soon be replaced by mechanical ones on an automatic lettuce harvester that has the potential to half labour costs.
Funded by Innovate UK, the prototype was developed with help from Grimme, the Agri-EPI Centre (Edinburgh), Harper Adams University, the University of Bristol, UK salad producers, G’s Fresh and PDM Produce, and German industrial camera manufacturer Imaging Development Systems.
Within the project, existing leek harvesting machinery is adapted to lift the lettuce clear from the ground and grip it in between pinch belts. The outer leaves are mechanically removed to expose the stem. Machine vision and artificial intelligence are then used to identify a precise cut point on the stem to neatly separate the head of lettuce.
