Robotics Company Advanced.Farm Successfully Pivots To Apple Picking

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Almost two years ago, we featured the impressive robotic strawberry picking of California-based Advanced.Farm. Since that time the company has expanded into apples, and certainly caught the attention of many growers with their ability to pick apples with their robot. But it’s rare for ag robotics companies to cross over to new copping systems. I asked director of hardware and systems engineering Mike Corsetto.

Corsetto… “We had the headstart we needed to get into apple based off of all our experience in strawberry and that looked like a number of different things. We utilized a lot of the same robot technology and kinematic that we used in strawberry into apple. Essentially, we moved from four robots in a line horizontally to two columns of robots vertically. So that's like the visible difference, but there was a whole lot of stuff in the background that helped accelerate our progress. We have a virtual simulator of our strawberry fields and our apple orchards. Basically an entire virtual playground for the robots to practice picking in. We were actually picking virtual apples before we were in Washington, picking real apples. And a lot of our development in the emulator directly informed some of the hardware decisions we made on the form factor and structure of the initial apple harvester in '22.”

That’s Advanced.farm’s Mike Corsetto. Learn more at advanced.farm.