Australians Plan to Use Robots for Harvesting Their Apples

Just like nearly every industry sector out there, agriculture has also been hit hard by the health crisis. Labor shortage is a real struggle that has to be addressed to avoid a future food crisis and other dire consequences.

Luckily for apple growers though, Australian researchers from the Monash University are on top of things. They developed a robot that can help with apple harvesting and trials so far look very promising.

The autonomous robot is controlled by a motion-planning algorithm and equipped with cameras. It can work in any weather and lighting conditions.

According to several trials run at Fankhauser Apples in Victoria, its vision system allowed it to harvest 85 percent of all apples in its range, from a distance of 1.2 meters (3.9 feet). The bot requires under 200 milliseconds to process the image of an apple.

“Our developed vision system can not only positively identify apples in a tree within its range in an outdoors orchard environment by means of deep learning, but also identify and categorize obstacles, such as leaves and branches, to calculate the optimum trajectory for apple extraction,” explained Dr. Chen, the Director of Laboratory of Motion Generation and Analysis and member of the research team.

Approximately 6 percent of the plucked apples were slightly damaged, in that their stems were removed. However, aside from the esthetic aspect, those apples could still be sold.

The harvesting speed of the robot varies depending on how it is set. When it was restricted to half its maximum speed, it could pluck the apples at 12.6 seconds per piece of fruit. However, when set at its full capacity, that time dropped at only 7 seconds per apple.