As in many industries in the world, the workforce working in the fruit picking sector in Australia was one of the sectors affected by the Covid-19 pandemic process. Australian researchers have developed a high-speed apple picking robot in apple orchards to alleviate this gap.
Robots benefit the agricultural world in many ways, from examining crops, herding sheep, controlling fields, and controlling and combating weeds. We're starting to see how robots are starting to play a role on the crop production side, with their ability to pick raspberries, harvest lettuce, and prune fruit trees.
Researchers at Australia's Monash University Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have developed a robot that can scan trees in orchards, detect existing fruits with cameras and algorithms, and harvest the leaves around the tree with minimal damage.
Chao Chen, who led the research; “This specially designed robot, with its four independent pneumatically operated fingers, harvests fruit smoothly with minimal damage to fruit and tree,” he says.
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Researchers who conducted field trials of apple harvesting robots this year saw that the robots, operated at half capacity, identified an apple in 12.6 seconds, picked it up and left it. The researchers, who shortened the time by about 9 seconds with the optimization in the picking and dropping process, stated that the robot identified the apple in 7 seconds, harvested and left it with full capacity operation. The robot is within 1.2 m of more than 90% of the apples within the camera field of view. can identify in distance. The team states that the robot can work at any time of the day, that is, day and night and in all weather conditions, while processing an apple image in less than 200 milliseconds.