Robotic Olive Harvesters Might Be on the Horizon

Summary

Abundant Robotics in California is devel­op­ing a fruit-pick­ing robot that uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to har­vest fruit, start­ing with apples but poten­tially expand­ing to olives, which could have sig­nif­i­cant impli­ca­tions for labor-inten­sive indus­tries like agri­cul­ture. The cost of sea­sonal labor in olive har­vest­ing may remain low due to high unem­ploy­ment rates in coun­tries like Spain, Italy, and Greece, but the increas­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness and effi­ciency of auto­mated har­vesters could lead to wide­spread adop­tion in the near future.

The future of agri­cul­ture is fast approach­ing and could dra­mat­i­cally affect olive oil pro­duc­tion costs. Abundant Robotics in Hayward, California is pro­to­typ­ing a fruit-picker that employs arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to deter­mine the opti­mal time to pick fruit as it vac­u­ums the prod­uct into a col­lec­tion bin.

The machine is cur­rently being tested on apples, but the com­pany founders antic­i­pate branch­ing out into other fruit in the future.

After secur­ing a $10 mil­lion invest­ment from Google Ventures, Yamaha Motor Company, and oth­ers, Abundant Robotics is poised to dis­rupt tra­di­tional agri­cul­tural meth­ods for har­vest­ing, includ­ing olives.

While the company’s cur­rent focus is on apple orchards in the United States and Australia, its vac­uum har­vest­ing tech­nol­ogy could also prove to be use­ful for olives, which are tra­di­tion­ally picked by hand because of their del­i­cate skin.

Using com­plex algo­rithms, Abundant’s har­vest­ing robot can dis­tin­guish a piece of fruit from its sur­round­ing leaves. Next, through a num­ber of visual vari­ables, the robot can deter­mine whether the fruit has achieved opti­mal ripeness and make the deci­sion to pick it.

The har­vester then aligns its vac­uum and removes the fruit from the tree. The machine can har­vest around the clock, using spe­cial imag­ing tech­nol­ogy at night.

Mechanized olive har­vest­ing often entails large machines that shake or envelop trees with large rakes or brushes. However, shak­ing could pose chal­lenges to a tree’s root struc­ture, while older, more irreg­u­larly-shaped olive trees may not fit inside the body of a mechan­i­cal har­vester. Using a robotic vac­uum might allow for more ver­sa­til­ity.

The arrival of auto­mated har­vest­ing could have a dra­matic impact on the sea­sonal labor force of the largest olive oil pro­duc­ers.

In Spain, unem­ploy­ment rose to 18.8 per­cent in the first quar­ter of 2017, while Italy and Greece cur­rently have rates around 11.3 and 21.7 per­cent, respec­tively. These coun­tries have also seen large influxes of eco­nomic migrants and refugees in recent years, increas­ing com­pe­ti­tion for jobs in labor-inten­sive indus­tries like agri­cul­ture.

As a result, the cost of sea­sonal labor in olive har­vest­ing will prob­a­bly be kept rel­a­tively low for Mediterranean pro­duc­ers in the near-term, mak­ing large-scale cap­i­tal invest­ments in robot­ics unlikely for all but the largest agri­cul­tural firms in the region.

In the United States, fruit and nut farms cur­rently employ roughly 41 per­cent of the country’s agri­cul­tural work­ers, or almost 200,000 peo­ple. Of this fig­ure, one-sixth of the work­force is com­prised of migrants. However, anti-immi­gra­tion pres­sures and increases to the min­i­mum wage could force pro­duc­ers to accel­er­ate the deploy­ment of agri­cul­tural tech­nolo­gies in the United States as the costs of cap­i­tal and labor reach par­ity.

As robots in the field con­tinue to advance and more com­peti­tors enter the mar­ket­place, the price for auto­mated har­vesters will become increas­ingly com­pet­i­tive. For olive oil pro­duc­ers who depend on speed and effi­ciency to press, bot­tle, and deliver a high-qual­ity prod­uct to their cus­tomers, the opti­mal price point for a robot that can work day and night with near-per­fect accu­racy may arrive sooner than later.

• PBS Newshour


• Agdaily