Applied Plant Research

About us

PPO (Applied Plant Research) is part of the Plant Science Group of Wageningen University & Research Centre (WUR). It is a world-renowned centre that combines fundamental and applied research with innovative education in the areas of food, agro-technology, production systems, and nature and the environment. As part of WUR, PPO is an organisation for strategic and applied-scientificresearch on plant and crop production for national and international authorities. Drawing on a history of more than 100 years of research in greenhouse horticulture and our vast experience in leading and participating in EU projects (e.g. CROPS, Spicy, Euphoros, Flow-aid, FutureFarm), the greenhouse horticulture group specializes in providing integrated solutions for sustainable horticultural production. Starting in the late 1990’s, the group began building its reputation in systems engineering and in the development of new, automated crop production systems and agro-robotic systems, including robots for harvesting cucumbers, for deleafing cucumbers, for harvesting roses, and various systems for vision-based grading of agricultural produce. With a strong focus on applied research, projects are commonly implemented in close collaboration with companies to assure that the results obtained are implemented in horticultural practice.

What motivates us

The greenhouse horticulture group is involved in researching robotics for greenhouse horticulture production as well as advanced mechanization in arable farming like autonomous weeding robot, automatic measuring thickness of ornamental trees and intra row weeding. Within the HUBRINA-Experiment PPO will be involved in task 1, in the definition of the overall systems specifications, in the design of the advanced control for the path following in task 2 and in the evaluation of the path following in task 3.