Apple picking robots headed for the farm
Apple picking robots headed for the farm
Publication date: 8/11/2016
Over two centuries, little has changed in the way apples
are harvested; by and large, it is still a manual process. But now, SRI Ventures,
a kind of startup incubator within the Menlo Park research and development firm
SRI International, is investing in and spinning out a startup called Abundant
Robotics Inc. to automate apple harvesting with agricultural robots currently
in development.
The robots, as yet unnamed, were designed to be strong
and fast enough to remove one fruit per second from a tree, but gentle enough
not to damage trees or the fruit, according to Abundant Robotics’ CEO and
co-founder Dan Steere.
They employ computer vision to recognize apples on the
branch that are ready for harvesting, and a kind of vacuum to remove the
apples, Steere said.
For power, the robots are plugged into the small tractors
already used pervasively in fruit farming.
Steere co-founded Abundant Robotics about a year ago, he
says, with CTO Curt Salisbury and Senior Software Architect Michael Eriksen
recognizing a massive market opportunity in agriculture.
The team had previously worked on research funded by SRI
and additional, non-dilutive grants from the Washington Tree Fruit commission
to bring automation to the field.
Farmers typically produce more than 9 billion pounds of
apples domestically, exporting 2.3 billion pounds of them in 2014-2015,
according to the USDA. And international consumption of them has been growing.
According to SRI Ventures President, Manish Kothari, it
had not been possible to automate the task of apple picking before recent
breakthroughs in computer vision and image processing were made.
He said, “You direct this robot to go someplace, see and
pick an apple, and go again. It’s a very non-trivial engineering challenge. To
detect apples very precisely you have to see down at the millimeter level in
real time. That requires software, and on the hardware side, chips that allow
you to do real time image processing on the fly.”
Following its spin out from SRI Ventures, Abundant
Robotics will aim to have its autonomous, robotic apple pickers in production
and at work in orchards within 2 years, and grow its 8-person team currently
based at SRI in Menlo Park, Calif.
The company has so far conducted field trials with
orchards in Washington state, and overseas in Australia. It plans to engage in
more of these prior to commercialization of its robots, Steere said.
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