InsightTRAC Seeks and Destroys Almond Mummies

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Last week The Almond Conference took place in Sacramento, featuring many technologies to help growers of one of California’s top crops. One innovation that caught a lot of attention is InsightTRAC, a robotic mummy removal device to manage one of the most challenging almond pests. CEO Anna Haldewang explains.

Haldewang… “During the almond harvest, not every almond is ready to be harvested during that time. So then when the leaves fall off the trees in the winter, those leftover almonds then turn rotten, and they're called mummies. And there's this past called navel orangeworm. And it's one of the number one pest problem for growers. It'll burrow inside of those mummies in the wintertime and hibernate. And in the spring, it'll merge into a moth and it'll damage the quality and the yield. So the best time to remove this costly pest it's when it's hibernating inside of those mummies. However, the current methods rely on wet weather to knock those mummies off and then labor crews have to come through and knock them off as well. And so it's, it's a pretty tough job to do that.”

Haldewang demonstrated how the InsightTRAC rover works - roaming an orchard and autonomously removing these mummies.

Haldewang… “So InsightTRAC, it'll stop in front of a section of a tree. It'll take an image and it'll map out the fastest and the quickest route to all those mummies in a matter of seconds. It then removes each mummy by shooting a biodegradable pellet at each one. And it can do that in under one second.”

InsightTRAC is currently taking orders for quarter four of 2022.