Many fruit growers across Australia were left scrambling to find pickers this season and were forced to leave fruit on the trees to rot. Would harvest be less stressful if they had a robot to do the work instead? A team of engineers from California are close to commercialising a machine that strips a canopy of apples using a vacuum arm. For the past five years they have been working on the prototype in orchards in Washington State and, more recently, at Warragul in south-east Victoria. Abundant Robotics chief executive Dan Steere said the invention may just be the solution to a global labour problem. "The industry struggles to attract a large enough labour force, even when they're paying pretty high wages," he said. "This has been a growing problem for several decades in the US as well as Australia and other places.

Robot stacks up well against people

The robot the company has developed can drive itself down an orchard row of apples and look for fruit on a trellis up to 3 metres tall. It is programmed to select fruit for colour, then using its arm, sucks in a piece of fruit off a branch. Mr Steere said the goal was to have the robot matching the quality of fruit picked by people. "When people are picking apples today, there's a certain amount of damage that happens as you pick them or empty them from the bag into the bin," he said. "In Victoria this past year, we were comparing the rate of damage which we saw with our machine. "It was actually measured by the packing house at 1.8 per cent to the human crews' picking. "So that level is actually a little bit less than the amount of damage that they normally see from people picking fruit."

No injury issues with machine

Tasmanian orchardist Scott Price thought he would never see an apple-picking robot in his lifetime. He reckons it will not be long before they will be driving up and down orchards on the Apple Isle. "A lot of new orchards would lend themselves very well to picking," Mr Price said. "The biggest fear we have in the orchard game is people injuring themselves. "If the machine injures itself we'll just take it back to the workshop and try to fix it, so that would be a bonus." Mr Price said not every farm would have the robots in the next five to 10 years, but bigger properties may. "And there may be a machine shared amongst growers," he said. "Technology will change very rapidly, I'm sure." Abundant Robotics' commercial release of its robotic apple picker is planned for next year. Source - http://www.abc.net.au