Apple harvesting drones

Even without the ongoing pandemic disrupting supply chains and making it even more difficult to hire seasonal labor, being a farmer is hard work, especially during harvest time.

A company called Tevel Aerobatics Technologies believes that with the help of an apple drone, it has come up with the best solution for fruit picking farmers.

This is not a drone from Apple, but a flying quadcopter with an attached outstretched arm that can intelligently aim, grab and pick apples from a tree before throwing them at the picker.

This is far from the first time fruit and vegetable picking on a farm has been automated with smart machines and even robots, but fruits like apples often benefit from human pickers who can visually check when they are ripe enough to be picked. collect during processing. this with the necessary care so as not to cause bruising or other damage.

Earlier approaches to automating apple picking relied on high-articulated robotic arms scanning trees for ripe fruit, but this approach has limitations, including how far a hand can reach and how many apples it can pick in a given amount of time. As improbable as Tevel's solution may seem, the idea of using multiple drones tied to a central machine at the same time has several advantages. As the car rolls slowly through an apple orchard, multiple drones delicately pick apples from multiple trees at once with suction grippers, and since they don't have to fly very far, a tether can be used to provide unlimited power to each drone.

Each drone is equipped with sensors and cameras not only to determine if the fruit is ready to be harvested, but also to know where to drop it using QR codes for guidance so that the machine can collect all the fruit in one container. Tevel promises that the machines can be tracked remotely using GPS and mobile apps and can run 24 hours a day, or at least until the central machine runs out of electricity or gasoline.