New artificial intelligence technologies that are improving farm production and disease prevention

Researchers at Griffith University led by Professor Yongsheng Gao work on improving farm production and disease prevention through advancing and deploying new artificial intelligence technologies for primary industry.

Professor Gao’s team from Griffith’s Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems and the School of Engineering created the RayBox 300, a commercially viable robot designed as a strawberry grading system that performs quality control of the fruit including detection of overripe and underripe fruit, bruises normally not visible to the naked eye, and foreign objects.

The Raybox 300 is based on innovative structure and texture, visual and spectral analysis technology developed by the research team and has been tested and adopted by Sunray Strawberries Pty Ltd in their strawberry packing sheds at Wamuran in Queensland and Myonga in South Australia.

The Raybox 300 benefits Australian strawberry farmers through the cost-effective, rapid, rigorous and objective checking of fruit quality. The system has demonstrated appeal to Coles Supermarket Australia Pty Ltd quality control team for its capability to automatically eject low quality punnets and reduce risks of pest contamination and disease.

Research and development to implement a fully automated strawberry harvesting system to do the picking, quality control and packing has advanced in partnership with investors and with support of competitive federal grants.