Erik Pekkeriet (born in 1970) is working as Programme Manager in Agro Food Robotics. He completed his BSc in Mechanical Engineering at Emmen, The Netherlands in 1994. He specialized himself in Maintenance Technology and Management. After he finished his BSc he started his career at Philips as a project employee in maintenance management at a Philips production plant. After a few years he started as a consultant in innovation management in Greenhouse Horticulture. He started as a single consultant, but built and led a department with 5 innovation consultants. After 7 years he made a change to Wageningen UR, to work directly with real technicians and researchers again, building great robots, vision sorting systems and new greenhouse production systems for, and together with farmers and machine manufacturers. Main projects he developed and worked on were: vision sorting systems for pot plants, cut flowers and vegetables in X-ray-, NIR-, Fluorescence- en RGB-technology in 2D and 3D; robot harvesting systems for cutting roses, gerberas, cucumbers, sweet peppers and tomato leaves and new moving greenhouse production systems for chrysanthemum, pot plants and cucumber. Erik coordinated the € 12M EU-project PicknPack (flexible robotic packaging systems). For the Dutch government he leads the scientific program: Precision Horticulture.Erik is also the founding father and network coordinator of the European Digital Innovation Hub network on Robotics named: agROBOfood

The last decade Erik broadened the robotic scope from greenhouse horticulture to open field, livestock, fish, food and other Wageningen agri-food domains. Erik is now leading the agilie team of the Agro Food Robotics Program which consist of 35 experts from Wageningen Reserarch. Erik is also an IPMA-C certified project manager. Other positions are:

• Boardmember of the topicgroup on Agricultural Robotics at EU Robotics
• Chair of topicgroup Greenhouse Horticultuire at the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Techniek in de Landbouw (Dutch Society of Technology in Agriculture)
• Network coordinator at the European agROBOfood network

Video about robotics in horticulture