12/4/08 Robots in the Orchard Part 2

Robots in the Orchard Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. The prospect of labor shortages and getting more production for less money is the driving factor behind bringing robots into the orchard. But there are of course a myriad of problems according to Derek Morikawa, CEO of San Diego based Vision Robotics. MORIKAWA: In the specialty crop area fruits and branches are much, much too busy and random to handle in an indiscriminate fashion. The only way to do that is to see and be intelligent about what you are doing. But just mounting a couple of cameras on a robot does not give it the intelligence to prune or pick fruit. MORIKAWA: It has to convert that to a map of the world where it understands what the objects in the world are and the map might be fruit locations or it might be the branch structure of a tree so it can then understand what to do with it. These robots are not just ideas on a drawing board according to Morikawa but they are real working, albeit still in the testing phase robots. MORIKAWA: We're working with the California citrus industry to eventually end up with a harvesting robot. We're working with the Washington apple industry to work on a robotics system that first scouts and then later does other actions like pruning and harvest and we're working with the California wine grape industry to work on a pruning robot. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.