Challenges of Manual Harvesting
Fruit and vegetable harvesting has always posed several challenges for farmers. It requires assembling teams of seasonal workers every harvest season, which is a logistically difficult task. Farm work also tends to be physically demanding as it involves long hours of repetitive bending, lifting and reaching. This makes it difficult to find and retain reliable labor. Additionally, farm wages have been rising steadily, putting pressure on production costs. All these factors have motivated growers to explore robotic alternatives.
Early Harvesting Robots
Some of the earliest Fruit Picking Robots date back to the 1990s but they had limited success due to technological constraints. Robots at that time lacked the computer vision, articulation and grasping capabilities required to select ripe fruits carefully without damage. They could only harvest a fraction of what a skilled human picker could manage in a day. However, advances in fields like machine learning, computer vision, motion control and miniaturization have enabled new generations of robots that can match and even surpass human performance.
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