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Harvest X, which aims to realize fully automatic cultivation of fruit and vegetable plant factories, announced on January 18 that it has raised a total of 50 million yen. The underwriters are the independent venture capital “ANRI No. 4 Investment Limited Partnership” (ANRI) and the Open Innovation Promotion No. 1 Investment Limited Partnership (AOI No. 1 Fund) operated by the University of Tokyo Collaborative Creation Platform Development (Tokyo University IPC). , Soichiro Kawai, Keisuke Sogawa, Kunihiro Tanaka.
The plant factory market is gaining attention due to food problems, a shortage of agricultural population, and the recent growing interest in food hygiene and safety due to the coronavirus. However, although leafy plant factories such as lettuce are expanding, fruits rely heavily on honeybee-mediated insect pollination, resulting in instability in pollination harvesting and cost of breeding management. Seems to be an issue.
HarvestX has been working on the development of pollination and harvesting technology using robots as an alternative to honeybees, and is currently aiming to fully automate the cultivation of strawberries from pollination to harvesting.
The company is a startup whose mission is to solve food problems through fully automatic cultivation of agricultural products. As a step toward achieving this, we are working to realize fully automatic cultivation of strawberries. Launched by the support program of “Hongo Tech Garage” sponsored by the University of Tokyo, “Todai To Texas” aiming to exhibit at the Trade Show of South by Southwest (SXSW) and through the unexplored IT human resources discovery and training project We have promoted the development of the underlying prototype.
The automatic pollination / harvest demonstration tester “XV1” for the automatic strawberry cultivation robot developed by HarvestX. It recognizes flowers and fruits using a depth camera and an image processing algorithm developed by Harvest X, and pollinates and harvests with a patent-pending dedicated attachment.Furthermore, we are aiming to demonstrate farm work in a large farm with the self-propelled trolley adopted for the first time.
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Category: Robotics
Tags: Financing (Terms), University of Tokyo (Terms), University of Tokyo Collaborative Creation Platform Development / University of Tokyo IPC (Terms), Agriculture (Terms), HarvestX, Japan (Countries / Regions)
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