LocalTea heeft dit gerepost
☕ Making tea is labour-intensive. It starts with the picking. The best leaves, the ‘two leaves and a bud’, grow on top of the plant from March to September. Besides craftsmanship, the secret to the best quality tea lies in those leaves and bud, says Wouter Eckelmans. At LocalTea, they pick by machine, with human precision. 🤖 He is enrolling LocalTea, together with Wageningen University & Research Vision Robotics researchers and machine builder Van Wees Waalwijk, in the NXTGEN Hightech programme. An umbrella initiative that aims to encourage SMEs to invest in technological advances. To develop a one-stop #tea #machine together. 1️⃣ First step: see if and how you can automate, manage and control the artisanal tea process. #WUR researchers are analysing what happens when in the tea leaf during that production process, and whether you can monitor and control it, says research associate Fátima Pereira da Silva. To that end, they replicated the entire tea-making process in separate parts. To dry the tea, they used their own drying oven. To roll the tea, they acquired a roller. “We performed the oxidation in an air-conditioned room at a constant temperature and humidity.” 🔗 Read the complete article here: https://lnkd.in/d2VGZ998 #visionrobotics