How robots, AI and lasers are revolutionizing plant propagation 

For more than 100 years and already in its third gen­er­a­tion, the fam­i­ly-owned com­pa­ny Bock Bio Sci­ence has been a lead­ing glob­al expert in in vit­ro and hor­ti­cul­tur­al plant prop­a­ga­tion. The idea for RoBo­Cut, the auto­mat­ed, laser-based prop­a­ga­tion of plants — reli­able, cost-effec­tive and sus­tain­able — was born 10 years ago. Today, own­ers Friederike and Stephan von Rund­st­edt lead a team of 14 experts and will begin a new gen­er­a­tion of plant prop­a­ga­tion in 2022. 

The idea behind the project: to auto­mat­i­cal­ly prop­a­gate ster­ile plants in an in-vit­ro lab­o­ra­to­ry. The process is quick­ly explained on paper: detect and grab, lay cut­ting lines, cut, pick up and place in fresh cups. The sys­tem relies on a laser on a high-per­for­mance robot­ic arm instead of the usu­al scalpel. This allows for a clean and high­ly pre­cise cut for opti­mal propagation. 

The cell with four robots pri­mar­i­ly serves large in vit­ro lab­o­ra­to­ries world­wide. These employ thou­sands of peo­ple at spe­cial­ly equipped work­bench­es. The automa­tion poten­tial there is accord­ing­ly extreme­ly large. But the solu­tion is also aimed at grow­ers and seedling producers. 

How did the topic get started? 

The com­pa­ny is a clas­sic plant and tis­sue cul­ture lab­o­ra­to­ry — with the aim of automat­ing prop­a­ga­tion in the lab­o­ra­to­ry. Until now, this was pri­mar­i­ly pos­si­ble through work in low-wage coun­tries. But Friederike and Stephan von Rund­st­edt were quick­ly cer­tain: prop­a­ga­tion should stay in Bre­men, includ­ing the exper­tise and know-how. The jour­ney began with the prop­a­ga­tion of rare orchids. Ini­tial dis­cus­sions with automa­tion part­ners around ten years ago ini­tial­ly result­ed in mixed feedback:

“Too com­plex, more than 40 deci­sions per minute at the work­bench, no machine can do that. With the advent of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, machine learn­ing and image recog­ni­tion, that changed slow­ly but surely.”

- Friederike von Rundstedt

In the begin­ning, the group was only devel­oped for Bock Bio Sci­ence itself, but inter­est from out­side grew rapid­ly after the first pre­sen­ta­tions. It was soon clear: The solu­tion should also be offered to com­peti­tors. In the future, the machines will be sup­plied to for­mer competitors. 

Four RS007N and RS007L robots are at the heart of the solution

Dur­ing a vis­it of Stephan von Rund­st­edt with an employ­ee of the Han­nover Messe, the first con­ver­sa­tion took place at the booth of Kawasa­ki Robot­ics. There, they quick­ly got into con­ver­sa­tion with the long-stand­ing Kawasa­ki inte­gra­tor DMP. The chem­istry was right from the start: Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Franz-Josef Diek­stall was enthu­si­as­tic about the idea from the start and was on board imme­di­ate­ly. “You have to find some­one who ticks like you and thinks ‘out of the box’ — and Mr. Diek­stall was just as crazy as we were,” laughs Stephan von Rundstedt. 

And he also found Kawasa­ki Robot­ics’ sup­port remark­able: “Kawasak­i’s will­ing­ness to uncom­pli­cat­ed­ly pro­vide us with a loan­er robot for tri­als and ini­tial pro­to­types was a great help, espe­cial­ly at the begin­ning of the project — so we were able to quick­ly gain momen­tum and confidence.” 

How is the system constructed? 

The RoBo­Cut sys­tem is a ful­ly ster­ile cell equipped with one RS007L and three RS007N high-per­for­mance robots from Kawasa­ki Robot­ics. Cups con­tain­ing plants to be prop­a­gat­ed are fed in via an infeed. These are opened and a sin­gle plant at a time is removed by a robot with a mechan­i­cal grip­per and pre­sent­ed to an image recog­ni­tion sys­tem — where the plant is pre­cise­ly cap­tured and the cut­ting lines defined with­in 0.3 seconds. 

Removal, camera detection, cutting and insertion into the culture medium: every step of the plant propagation process is fully automatic

The plant is then trans­ferred to the so-called laser cham­ber, where it is divid­ed accord­ing to the laid cut­ting line. This is where the actu­al auto­mat­ic prop­a­ga­tion takes place: The laser divides the plant into indi­vid­ual shoots, which are placed on a ster­ile con­vey­or belt. From there, they are grabbed by anoth­er robot and placed in a new cup with fresh agar-agar cul­ture medi­um. The cup is closed and leaves the machine via the out­feed. Automa­tion with RoBo­Cut allows non-con­tact han­dling of the plants in the ster­ile room — with­out human contact. 

The laser cuts precisely and quickly along the natural growth line 

The advan­tage of the laser over con­ven­tion­al scalpels: A laser beam has only a quar­ter of the thick­ness of a scalpel in com­par­i­son. The cut is absolute­ly pre­cise, fast and caus­es no dam­age to the plant. Com­bined with the sys­tem’s image recog­ni­tion, the laser can also cut pre­cise­ly along the nat­ur­al growth line. The result: sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter growth in the new plants, as they can imme­di­ate­ly absorb nutri­ents more intensively. 

Although RoBo­Cut was ini­tial­ly devel­oped for the dif­fi­cult-to-repro­duce Pha­laenop­sis orchids, the sys­tem is also suit­able for prop­a­gat­ing numer­ous oth­er plants — includ­ing orna­men­tal plants, woody plants, peren­ni­als or nutri­tion­al­ly rel­e­vant plants such as pota­toes. How­ev­er, RoBo­Cut will also be used out­side plant and tis­sue cul­ture — in veg­e­ta­tive prop­a­ga­tion — in the future. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant for cut­tings pro­duc­ers, such as euca­lyp­tus, street trees, bed­ding and bal­cony plants and much more. Sev­er­al oth­er crops will fol­low in the next few years. For exam­ple, there have already been some inquiries about prop­a­gat­ing med­ical cannabis — a mar­ket with enor­mous growth prospects. 

Artificial intelligence defines perfect cutting lines 

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) plays a key role at RoBo­Cut: In addi­tion to the four con­trollers for the robots, three indus­tri­al PCs and an AI serv­er are installed. 16 cam­eras pro­vide the nec­es­sary input for the vision recog­ni­tion soft­ware. The AI is used in almost every step of the process, such as post-removal recog­ni­tion. Based on these images, a 3D mod­el is gen­er­at­ed, on which the cut­ting lines are defined using AI. Before the laser cut is made in the next step, the plant is record­ed again and the 3D mod­el is aligned — so any dis­place­ments dur­ing trans­port can be eas­i­ly com­pen­sat­ed for. 

The neatly separated offshoots are placed in an agar-agar medium

The final chal­lenge in the process: remov­ing the cor­rect plant parts from the assem­bly line in the appro­pri­ate posi­tion and plac­ing them in the agar-agar medi­um. By using AI, the robot receives the exact infor­ma­tion to sort out unwant­ed plant parts and pre­cise­ly remove and place the cor­rect offshoots. 

Focus on sustainability and environmental protection 

For Friederike von Rund­st­edt, the fac­tors of envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty were in the fore­ground right from the start: “With one unit, we can replace up to ten ster­ile work­bench­es and save ener­gy. This also makes on-site pro­duc­tion worth­while, and emis­sions from thou­sands of air miles to favor­able pro­duc­tion coun­tries are avoid­ed.” The rapid and healthy growth of the pre­cise­ly cut plant cut­tings also sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces the use of crop pro­tec­tion prod­ucts in the down­stream pro­duc­tion process. 

With more than five bil­lion plants pro­duced in vit­ro and an annu­al growth rate of twelve per­cent, the glob­al demand is enor­mous. “Our solu­tion is urgent­ly await­ed on the mar­ket,” adds Stephan von Rund­st­edt. In the future, plants that are not yet pro­duced in vit­ro can also be pro­duced using the same method — local­ly, sus­tain­ably and always with con­sis­tent qual­i­ty. The team is already look­ing into the ques­tion of which addi­tion­al process­es in plant pro­cess­ing can be automated.