| Representative |
Yuki Ichikawa
Born in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture in 1997. Graduated from the Department of Information Engineering at Chiba Institute of Technology. While still a student, he started working as a self-employed businessman, undertaking embedded equipment and FA design. In parallel, he launched the HarvestX project at the University of Tokyo's Hongo Tech Garage in 2018, and succeeded in the world's first robotic pollination of strawberries. In order to implement the technology he developed in society, he founded HarvestX Inc. in 2020.
He was certified as a MITOU Super Creator in 2019 and an InoVation Ino Beta in 2020. |
| Motivation, Goals, and Ideal World |
I've loved making things since I was a child, and I started training in robotics when I was in high school. During my university years, I worked as an intern, supporting the launch of Sony's programming educational toys for children by making prototypes. At the same time, I was also working as a self-employed person, making embedded equipment for agriculture. Through these jobs, I had more opportunities to talk to farmers, and while listening to their problems in detail, I wanted to solve them with robots.
Currently, our company provides solutions that use robots and AI to automate the pollination and harvesting processes for plant factories that grow strawberries in closed spaces. In the strawberry production process, we automate the most bottlenecks in automating cultivation: plant management, pollination, and harvesting, achieving stable production.
The most difficult thing about automation is the high hurdle of whether the product can withstand 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on site. It is a given that the product will work perfectly, but if production is increased to 1,000 or 10,000 units, it must maintain high precision to operate stably.
Going forward, we hope to continue to provide products that will be useful to Japanese farmers, by enabling cultivation in any environment, including responding to weather and disasters caused by climate change, which is becoming more severe every year, and adjusting the size and shape of the cultivation shelves. In the future, we hope to not only have plant factories, but also to use technology to help each other, while inheriting the know-how that farmers have accumulated over the years, and passing it on to future generations. |
