Flying Robots Picking Fruits: Leveraging AI for Automatic Fruit Harvesting

Flying robots can now pluck different fruits by leveraging AI to drive revenue

Fruit harvesting is a tiring and rigorous job for professionals involved in fruit farming worldwide. There is always a proper time to pluck fruits, different time periods for different fruits. The introduction of cutting-edge technologies like AI, machine learning, and deep learning has transformed the overall process of fruit harvesting. Thus, fruit farmers can leverage AI for automatic fruit harvesting to avoid any further wastage of seasonal fruits— fruits are one of the most wasted produces in the global market. The emergence of robotics and AI has manufactured flying robots or fruit-picking robots in some parts of the world where fruit farmers can use robots in fruit harvesting.

The Mechanism Behind Flying Robots Picking Fruits

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has drastically affected fruit harvesting with all the restrictions and lockdowns. Flying robots with AI mechanisms can identify the right fruits for plucking and help in picking them autonomously. These fruit-picking robots can help fruit farmers to save a huge amount of money and reduce fruit wastage per year globally. Flying robots can work throughout the days and nights to pick up only ripe fruits at the right time. The robots provide real-time updates to a central computer on the volume and value of fruit picked while pruning the orchards afterward.

Fruit-picking robots leverage AI perception algorithms to spot trees as well as vision algorithms to identify the perfectly ripen fruit among the tree full of raw or foliage. These fruit-picking robots choose the best approach to pluck fruits with their robotic picking arms. Robots in fruit harvesting are helping to harvest large orchards with a single autonomous digital brain. Fruit-picking robots leverage AI with computer vision, data fusion, and perception, aeronautical engineering, robotics as well as state-of-the-art flight control for effective flying.

This has started a concern regarding the replacement of human fruit-pickers with robots in automatic fruit harvesting. But the tech companies have ensured that these flying robots are built to work with human employees for a long period of time to boost productivity and earn more revenue than previous years. There is high flexibility for robots in fruit harvesting that enables them to harvest multiple fruits at a time without any overlapping.

There are multiple tech companies that are focused on building new cutting-edge technologies for the agricultural sector such as satellites, drones, robots, smart irrigation systems, and many more. An Israeli-based start-up, Tevel Aerobotics Technologies, is set to launch this flying robot or fruit-picking robot for effective automatic fruit harvesting. The aim of this AgTech start-up is to transform manual fruit harvesting into automatic fruit harvesting with flying autonomous robots or fruit-picking robots.

Another fruit-picking robot known as Robocrop is already on trial to pick over 25,000 raspberries per day. Robocrop plucks raspberries with its robotic arms and deposits those into a waiting punnet. The time-efficient process takes almost a minute for each raspberry while leveraging sensors and hi-tech 3D cameras that can zoom in on ripe fruits with the help of AI and machine learning algorithms.