Washington and Oregon University researchers collaborate on orchard robots for many tasks
Every year, apple fruit thinning overlaps with cherry harvest, posing tough labor management decisions.
Northwest engineering researchers are working on a bot for that.
Students and researchers at Oregon State University and Washington State University are developing a robotic fruitlet thinner with a computer-vision-guided robotic arm that identifies fruitlets and reaches out with a claw-like end effector to yank them off the tree and drop them to the ground.
In fact, the engineering teams are working on a robot that would take care of several apple functions — pruning, cluster-by-cluster pollination, blossom thinning and fruitlet thinning. All use a similar arm with six points of articulated motion guided by computer vision and machine learning.
