Apple Whooshh

Apple Whooshh

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Vincent Bryan started a company called Whooshh Innovations. Their idea was to develop a mechanized system for harvesting fruits like apples from the tree and gently transporting them to a bin without bruising. “We started in fruits with the idea of how do we move in apple from a tree into a bin gently. The reason we were looking at that topic was how can we mechanize the harvesting of fruit and it came down to how do you gently do this. My folks have property over in Eastern Washington and we grow grapes and apples primarily. I had been working at Adobe Systems for a number of years and was looking to make a change and had come back to some of the family business stuff and was really looking at the books and saying the harvest labor costs are very high. Why are we all doing this by manual labor and my dad and I started having a conversation about how could we mechanize the picking of fruit. We actually decided that it was going to be difficult to pick a fruit off a tree robotically. The pickers were quite fast if in fact they were allowed to pick all of the time but there was a large percentage of the time, depending on what they were picking, that would have an effect on the outcome. We decided with the apples that the problem really wasn’t how fast the pickers could pick, the problem was allowing them to pick most of the time. Much of their time was going to going up and down the ladders and getting into the bins.” So Vincent designed a tube system that used a pressure differential to deliver apples gently to the bins.
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