Robotics-ready AI in Viticulture

The Challenge:

The coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has caused a sharp increase in input costs for wine grape growers, while exacerbating existing labour shortages. Furthermore, climate change and market instability continue to influence agribusiness managers' on-farm decision making.

Robotics and autonomous systems are aiming to help alleviate some of these challenges. As these new services continue to develop and rollout across the sector, there are increased opportunities to leverage this technology for value-adding services, such as yield prediction.
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The Solution:

The Yield, Yamaha, UTS, Food Agility and Treasury Wine Estates have partnered to explore the opportunities presented by combining robotics, micro-climate weather services and artificial intelligence (AI) for wine grape production.

This project will test the ability for field robots to observe vine growth and vine health to feed into The Yield’s Digital Playbook and AI predictions of wine grape tonnage and other harvest features throughout each growing season.

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Key Outcomes:

• Measuring opportunity for autonomously collected vineyard data to improve the accuracy of harvest predictions using machine learning/AI.
• Evaluating the benefit(s) of robotics to improve on-farm and post-farm decision making.
• Building a more efficient and sustainable wine sector through effectively harnessing the power of robotics and AI.