Autonomous fruit harvesting equipment maker Advanced Farm Technologies Inc. is designing new robots to pick apples, with the help of a grant from a Washington state ag group.
Davis-based Advanced Farm has developed and deployed autonomous robots that are now in use in California picking strawberries, and the new equipment will use some of the same software, optics and robotics the company developed for the new customers in Washington.
“In Washington, they are very innovative looking forward to automation,” said Peter Ferguson, director of business development with Advanced Farm.
“Labor is a difficult issue for farmers, and there is a lot less available every year,” he said.
Advanced Farm is now working on a couple of prototypes it plans to deploy in August for the three-month harvest season.
The company introduced its technology more than two years ago for strawberries. The machines use four onboard robots with custom cameras and robotic arms and fingers to find and pick ripe strawberries. It’s a hard task because the machine must determine ripe from unripe, berry from leaves, and then not ruin the fruit in picking it.
Apples are a tougher fruit than strawberries, but you still don’t want to bruise the fruit, Ferguson said. The apple picker will use suction cups to pick the fruit without damaging it.
Advanced Farm can repurpose much of its strawberry technology of autonomous operation, robotic arms, cameras, software and other developments for apples with some modifications. Eventually, it could also develop pickers for other specialty tree fruit, from stone fruit to avocados. In harvesting tree fruit, the robots offer the advantage of not requiring laborers to climb and descend ladders all day long. Advanced Farm sees a future in autonomous harvesting of all sorts of delicate specialty crops, Ferguson said.
Some tree crops, like almonds, walnuts and olives, can be harvested in rough methods such as violently shaking trees or slapping the fruit off them, but that won't work for more delicate produce.
Earlier this year, the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission awarded Advanced Farm a three-year grant to help develop a robotic apple harvesting robot. The value of the grant was not released.
Advanced Farm now has 10 of its strawberry harvesting robots deployed in California, where some of them are harvesting over 100,000 strawberries a day, mostly in the areas around Santa Maria and Oxnard on outdoor farms. There is usually one technician overseeing three machines in case they need intervention.
At the end of last year, Advanced Farm raised $25 million in an investment round led by venture capital firms and corporate investors. The harvesters can work autonomously 24 hours a day, taking some of the pain out of the growing shortage of farmworkers available to harvest food.
At the time Advanced Farm got the funding in September, it had 35 employees. It now has 55, with most of them based out of a barn in Davis, Ferguson said.
