Orchard Automation Is On The Horizon
May 28, 2016 Automation — it’s been something that’s been mentioned in tree fruit industry circles for a while. It’s something that has been approached with a bit of skepticism – almost an ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ mentality among growers.
However, industry experts say the advent of fully automated orchard tasks are on the cusp of happening — with a few companies leading the automotive harvest charge.
Once such company is Abundant Robotics, a spinoff of SRI International. This company has moved from R&D to field testing in Washington, thanks in part to grants from the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission.
“We expect that first commercial product to be available within the next couple of years,” Dan Steere, co-founder and CEO of Abundant Robotics, says.
Grower input has been a very important part of the development of this robotic harvester, Steere says. Albeit, growers were justifiably skeptical at first, he says.
“Once we’ve actually been in the orchards, and they’ve seen us picking, they’ve gotten very excited and then they start peppering us with all sorts of questions,” he says. “The main thing is they want to see proof — that’s a nice benefit of the fieldwork we’ve done, a lot of folks got to see what we were doing as we were going through the various steps.”
Steere and his co-founder, Curt Salisbury, chief technology officer of Abundant Robotics, have paid a lot of attention to fruit damage, which Steere says the harvester has shown to be comparable to people. The team has also tested the harvester on several cultivars and variations within those cultivars.
“We’ve seen uniformly good results in terms of damage to the fruit, and in terms of vision systems efficiently identifying fruit,” he says.
From here, the team has a prototype testing in Australia and then they’ll be back up in Washington to harvest this fall. They won’t say when the equipment will be available to growers, but one thing Steere emphasizes is making sure your orchard system is ready.
“For folks planting orchards who also have an eye toward what’s coming, one recommendation is to look at systems that are trained closer to the trellis, that are more planar, and more consistent,” Steere says. “You’ll see significantly better results with the automation that will be available within the next few years.”
An up-close view of the robotic picking arm in Fresh Fruits Robotics’ apple harvester. (Photo credit: FFRobotics)
Israeli Company Also Explores Automation
Earlier this year, Fresh Fruit Robotics and CEAR Lab debuted a robotic apple harvester at a Microsoft research and development showcase in Tel Aviv, Israel. Fresh Fruit Robotics is an Israeli robotics startup, and its founders say their harvester is less than two years away from commercial use.
The robotic harvester is working in the orchard.(Photo credit: FFRobotics)
This robotic harvester uses 10 to 12 robotic harvesting arms controlled by special software designed for fruit recognition and sizing. The harvester also uses grippers and sensors automatically to detect the location, size, and color of the fruit. The machine can pick about 10,000 fruits (apples, citrus, peaches, pears etc.) per hour, depending on the structure of the orchard and the fruits.
“It requires one operator sitting in a small cabin, driving the harvester down an orchard aisle. The robotic arms then come to action and perform the harvesting task according to the predetermined software-guided instructions,” says Gad Kober , vice president of business development for Fresh Fruit Robotics. “The operator can monitor and control the entire system from the cabin, while the arms pick the fruit from both sides of the aisle.”
The harvested fruit moves through an aid system, using a conveyor belt or suction tubes to move the harvested fruit into the bins. Kober is quick to point out that this robotic harvester will work best in fruiting walls and in testing this past fall, data showed that the harvester picked export quality fruit.
Kober says the harvester will be field tested next year here in the U.S., and more information can be found at FFRobotics.com.
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