Some farmers are turning to AI, robots, and drones to pick, trim, pull weeds, and manage their crops to solve the shortage of fruit pickers and cut costs. “There are never enough hands available to pick fruit at the right time and at the right cost. The fruit is left to rot in the orchard or sold at a fraction of its peak value, while farmers lose billions of dollars each year,” said Israeli company Tevel Aerobotics Technologies.
There are some concerns with such robots and AI leading to human unemployment. However, Tevel has developed a flying autonomous robot – dubbed FAR – to complement human fruit pickers rather than replace them.
The FAR robot utilizes AI to identify and pick the ripest fruit and work 24 hours a day. It combines computer vision with artificial intelligence, data fusion and perception, aeronautical engineering, advanced robotics, and state-of-the-art flight control.
The robot uses AI perception algorithms to pinpoint the trees and vision algorithms to distinguish the fruit among the leaves and classify its size and ripeness. High flexibility levels enable the robot to harvest multiple fruit types, including avocados, apples, pears, and oranges. After identifying the ripe fruit, the FAR robot determines the best way to approach the fruit while remaining stable as its picking arm grabs the fruit.
A single autonomous digital brain integrated into a ground-based unit allows several FAR robots to harvest the orchards without getting in each other’s path. Tevel’s fruit-picking FAR robot delivers high performance at a low cost. They also work on pruning and thinning functions.
Tevel is working towards marketing its first autonomous fruit-picking robot-drone within this year. Kubota (a Japanese agricultural machinery manufacturer) has invested $20 million into the project to help achieve this goal.
Agricultural technology is on the rise worldwide, from French farms using algorithms, satellites, drones, AI, and robots to a 2-acre vertical farm in California run by AI and robots. MIT engineers have also developed sensors made of carbon nanotubes that can be embedded in plant leaves. These sensors send a signal to the farmer’s smartphone when the plant is stressed, injured, infected, or damaged from sunlight.
