Advanced farm’s apple harvester autonomously picks 30 apples a minute. (Image Credit: advanced farm)
Apple picking can be tiring for farmers, especially when facing a labor shortage over the past few years. This occurs everywhere around the world. For example, the Munich region suffers from a harvester shortage, so it has self-picking fields. Automating those tasks can go a long way in the agriculture sector. Well, that’s the idea behind advanced farm’s apple-picking robot, which is deployed in Washington. The Washington Tree Fruit Research omission awarded the company with a three-year grant for apple-picking robotic developments.
The robot features some of the same optics, software, and robotic technology already used in the strawberry-picking robots. This apple harvester uses multiple robotic arms and suction cup grippers to quickly pick the apples without causing damage. It also has an onboard stereo camera to determine whether or not the fruit is ripe and ready for picking. Nearly 30 apples a minute are picked by the robot!
Each harvester also drives autonomously during the harvest season, so growers won’t need to intervene while scaling operations. These machines rely on a lightweight chassis and hybrid-electric drive system that glides precisely and efficiently atop the soil, working in the rain or sun.
The company could design and build harvesters for specialty tree fruit, including avocados and stone fruit. Tree fruit harvesting robots are advantageous in this case because workers would otherwise need to climb up and down ladders during the day. Advanced Farm envisions a future with autonomous harvesting of varying specialty crops.
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