Strawberry Picking Goes Mechanical

Strawberry Picking Goes Mechanical CROPS Miscellaneous The always-tedious and time-consuming job of picking strawberries by hand may soon be mechanized Robotics companies in Spain and Belgium have introduced machines to pluck ripe berries sort them by size and gently place them into trays The Spanish-designed Agrobot SW6010 is a 4-wheel-drive unit powered by a Lombardini diesel 28 5 hp engine The SW6010 manages a set of “robotic manipulators” able to locate identify select and pick strawberries one-by-one based on size and degree of ripeness Workers sit at two stations aboard the machine where they monitor fruit that’s moving on a conveyor and pack it into containers Agrobot says the machine’s ability to select berries based on ripeness is controlled by AGvision® cameras that identify ripe fruit A fully-automated strawberry picking robot developed by Octinion of Belgium is expected to reach the market by 2018 The company says the machine is designed for greenhouse harvesting and is capable of damage-free picking of 70 percent of ripe strawberries The machine’s 3D vision detects ripe berries which are picked by patented soft-touch gripper cups The robotic arm only selects and picks berries if it’s possible to pick the berry without bruising A company spokesperson says the machine is as gentle as human pickers and can pick one strawberry every 3 seconds The robot can be programmed to sort berries by size and quality and will place berries in their final packaging The company says its machine delivers picking quality speed and sorting comparable to the ideal human picker but with advanced monitoring Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Agrobot Oxnard Calif 93030 ph 805 302-0040; www agrobot com or Octinion Interleuveniaan 46 B-3001 Heverlee-Leuven Belgium ph 32 16 38 73 10; www octinion com

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