AI robots can now help harvest orchards. Here’s how

Even before the pandemic, growers were finding it hard to recruit people for picking. Covid restrictions have now prevented seasonal workers crossing borders.

Representational image | Commons

It’s getting harder to find fruit pickers to harvest the world’s orchards. COVID-19 travel restrictions have prevented seasonal workers crossing borders, so some farmers are turning to AI drones to pick their crops.

Even before the pandemic, growers were finding it increasingly hard to recruit people for picking. In July 2019, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) warned of continued labour shortages.

Farmers “try to hire American workers, but there are not many takers – and those who do take farm jobs often quit before the season is over,” said AFBF President Zippy Duvall.

Last year, with travel restrictions in place around the world, governments across Europe appealed to those who had lost their jobs in the pandemic to help with the harvest. Spain and Italy even offered to allow illegal migrants the right to work as pickers.

Now an Israeli company, Tevel Aerobotics Technologies, has invented a flying autonomous robot (FAR) which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and pick fruit. The robot can work 24 hours a day and picks only ripe fruit.

Picking the best

The innovation was a direct response to labour shortages. “There are never enough hands available to pick fruit at the right time and the right cost. Fruit is left to rot in the orchard or sold at a fraction of its peak value, while farmers lose billions of dollars each year,” the company says.

The FAR robot uses AI perception algorithms to locate fruit trees and vision algorithms to find the fruit among the foliage and classify its size and ripeness. The robot then works out the best way to approach the fruit and remain stable as its picking arm grasps the fruit.

The drones are able to harvest the orchards without getting in each other’s way because of a single autonomous digital brain in a ground-based unit.

A job few people want

Over 800 million tonnes of fruit are produced globally each year representing an annual market worth over half a trillion US dollars.

“We need a large number of reliable pickers and we have to pay wages, organize visas, housing, food, healthcare and transportation,” said John White, CEO of Marom Orchards, one of the first fruit farms to use the new flying robot pickers.

“Costs are rising all the time. This is hard, seasonal work and other crops can pay higher wages. Young people all over the world are abandoning agricultural work in favour of higher paying, full-time urban jobs,” he added.

Tevel insists its robots are designed to complement human fruit pickers rather than replace them. The company claims there will be a shortage of five million pickers by 2050 and says its drones will ensure the 10% of fruit currently left unharvested will all be picked in future.

The United Nations has designated 2021 as the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, with a focus on innovation and improved technologies to increase the efficiency and productivity of fruit and vegetable farming and to reduce loss and waste.

Last year, the World Economic Forum’s report, Data-Driven Food Systems for Crisis Resiliency, said technology must be used to make agriculture more sustainable in the aftermath of COVID-19 and called for an “innovation ecosystem” to foster new developments.

This article was originally published at World Economic Forum.