Robotic Apple Picking Making Great Strides

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

For many years, companies have been trying to build a robotic apple picker that could be used commercially in orchards and relieve some of the labor burdens from producers. The team at advanced.farm robotics believe they are very close, and director of hardware and systems engineering Mike Corsetto shared some of their impressive progress from this past year.

Corsetto… “We've doubled again our average pick rate. And so when I mean average, I mean like warts and all, you know when things are going wrong and when things are working well. I think it's just shy of 2,500 apples an hour on average across the entire season. And a lot of that is being done in Washington with, no engineers on site. It's operators operating the equipment.”

To further push the boundary of what’s possible with these machines, advanced.farm maintained a pace of 1/bin per hour for a full 24 hours.

Corsetto… “We picked 24 bins in 24 hours, a contiguous 24 hour stretch. And so really cool to see, every year we're showing a little bit more of the picture of what the future of automated harvest with advanced.farm harvesters can look like in the apple industry. And I think that effort where we picked over 43,000 apples in that 24 hour window filled up 24 bins, it was such a cool thing to be a part of. And I think it's just a small slice of what's to come.”

Again that’s Mike Corsetto of advanced.farm.