Bio Plugs and Unicamp will use robots in agribusiness

ABB Robótica, the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and Bio Plugs are developing an innovative robotic application for the agricultural industry in the country. The project consists of using a solution with the GoFa collaborative robot from the Swiss-Swedish multinational, equipped with a 3D vision system, for planting plant seedlings.

The expectation is that the pilot project will be ready at the end of March 2024. Based on the results, the possibility of the solution being applied on a large scale will be evaluated, helping the Brazilian agribusiness sector to overcome the challenge of meeting the global demand for products with increasingly scarce labor.

According to the United Nations, currently, more than half of the world's population already lives in cities and urban centers, and the projection is that the urban population will continue to increase to around 68% by 2050.

“As a result, the agro industry has an increasingly reduced workforce, with an increase in the population leaving the countryside for the cities. Therefore, companies are finding it more difficult to find people for manual work, and robotics comes to add and help with productivity. Using collaborative robotics, the company will have the best of both worlds, where the robot can work alongside people, in collaboration, without the need for protective barriers”, says Nelson Kumagai, Robotics manager at ABB's General Industries area in Brazil.

Bio Plugs, a company from Atibaia (SP) that produces flower seedlings and ornamental plants throughout Brazil, hopes to gain productivity and scale to keep up with market growth. According to data from the Brazilian Institute of Floriculture (Ibraflor), the flower sector, including production, wholesale and retail, grows year after year and reached a turnover of R$10,9 billion in 2021, an increase of 15% compared to the year previous.

Designed to work directly and continuously safely alongside people and easy to install and use, GoFa helps companies automate processes to assist workers who have repetitive and ergonomically challenging tasks. The first GoFa model was launched in February 2021, together with SWIFTI. The two families are part of ABB's line of cobots, inaugurated in 2015 by YuMi, the first truly collaborative robot in the world.

ABB cobots are designed so that customers do not need to rely on their own programming experts. The collaborative robot can be operated within minutes of installation, intuitively, straight out of the box, without any specialized training. This makes the adoption of technology more attractive, especially by industries with low levels of automation.