Washington Looking to Iintroduce Robots into Orchards by Sarah Hoxie
With the cost of seasonal labor increasing and the availability of a semi-skilled labor force becoming more and more uncertain, robots may soon make harvesting more efficient for fruit growers, according to ScienceBlog.
Manoj Karkee, assistant professor with the Center for Precision and Automated Agricultural Systems at Washington State University, and his team of WSU scientists recently won a $548,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to develop tree fruit harvesting technology that will allow robots and humans to work side by side.
“Due to the complexity of fruit identification in an orchard environment, collaboration between human and machine is very important. This is what’s unique,” said Karkee. “When the robot can’t deliver, humans will step in and vice versa.”
For example, whenever apples are in clusters or obscured by leaves and branches, a robot requires complex algorithms and long computational time to identify them, but humans can quickly identify fruits in these situations. However, when the two work together, the fruit is identified faster than human or machine alone.
Karkee and his team, which includes Karen Lewis, Changki Mo, and Qin Zhang, will consider things like the delicacy of the fruit and the dynamics of picking fruit by hand to determine how their robots can best detach fruit from the tree. They will also study growth patterns of various types of apples, and record and analyze videos of hand motions during manual picking and force and pressure data to transfer this knowledge to a robotic hand for a highly efficient fruit removal system – one that won’t damage fruit.
“Growers are very, very interested in this technology and are enthusiastically waiting for it,” said Karkee. “In three to five years, we hope to have a prototype to demo in the field, and in another five years be able to point to where growers can adopt the technology.”
Funding for the research was awarded through the National Robotics Initiative, a joint program of the National Science Foundation, USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture, National Institutes of Health and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
