12/3/08 Robots in the Orchard

Robots in the Orchard. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Many people in the ag industry are seeing a future without the necessary hands to complete to job. When it comes to most row crops, that is not a problem but tree fruit and vine fruit growers are not waiting to see what happens. They are taking action and that action could mean something like Star Wars in the orchard with robots and droids doing the jobs of people. MORIKAWA: Why robotics? Mechanization has been around in specialty crops for a while and most of it is what I'll call indiscriminant mechanization. So it's things like shakers for grapevines that take the grapes off the vine, shakers in the Florida juice industry and in the grape industry mechanical hedge pruners that go and give a buzz cut to the vines. Derek Morikawa is the CEO of San Diego based Vision Robotics that are creating robots that actually "see". MORIKAWA: It's a touch industry; you need to handle the fruit delicately. And likewise when you are doing operations like pruning or thinning, ideally you'd like to do a job that uses skill and the art of seeing what you are working on and pruning. They have been working with numerous technologies including a soon to be released robot vacuum cleaner that will actually see your room. MORIKAWA: To give you an example from our consumer world, what seeing means is using a pair of stereo cameras that work just like human eyes to get depth information. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.